There are many parallels between magic and other fields such as music or even cookery. For example you can think of a card trick as a recipe and a sleight as an ingredient in that recipe. If the trick is ‘Twisting the Aces’ then the integral ingredient is of course the E—— Count. There are almost as many ways of executing the EC as there are magicians attempting to do it. By that I mean that my own idiosyncratic handling will be different from yours; and this is without those aspects that are technically and quantifiably different.
Category: Cards
Advice on playing-cards for magicians
Visual vs Cerebral Magic
The difference between something seen and something reasoned or thought about is obvious. I can show you, say, two apples and three bananas (five fruits in total) or alternatively ask you to think of ‘2a + 3b = 5f’. One is perception (or a mixture of perception and thought) and the other, purely thought. In magic, however, the differences between visual magic and cerebral – tricks seen and those created in the mind – are not immediately clear, mainly because most tricks are a mixture of the two.
Routining – The Formal Side of the Equation
We have looked at the multi-dimensional world of routining for the informal performer. In that world there are fewer formulae and fixed ways of looking at routining, because informally one is not doing long routines for captive audiences, but at most linking tricks individually or in pairs for people and groups who may not have asked for or expected a magic show. As mentioned there, we might produce the four Aces and then do a trick with them, but we won’t do a five-minute routine of Ace tricks if we know what’s good for us (and our spectators). To do so would be to end up ‘putting on a show’ and dominating a situation where, probably, all people wanted to see at most were a couple of card tricks as part of the broader social interaction. It’s equivalent to someone asking ‘How are you?’ and then using them for the next half hour as a surrogate therapist.
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The Multi-Dimensional World of Routining
As soon as you learn more than one piece of magic, the question arises as to what order to do the tricks in. Of course with two tricks it isn’t hard; you just do whichever trick feels right, first. However, as you develop a repertoire over the months and years this approach to routining – doing tricks in whichever order feels right – remains the core approach. Other factors such as choreography and logistics become more significant the more one develops magically, and the professional must be acutely aware of peaks and troughs of impact; but the artistic and intuitive side of the equation remains strongly significant.
Psychology of Conjuring – Part 3
In the first two parts of this series (Part 1 and Part 2) we looked at patter and misdirection in terms of their psychological impact on spectators. Using patter is so much more than reciting words (when performing informally we don’t usually recite anything at all): we have to use the right words in the right way, both to connect with people and misdirect them effectively. The subtlety and complexity of this task comes to light when we acknowledge that everyone we perform for, and every situation, is different. The more one is aware of this difference, the harder it is to produce satisfactory results, but the better those results will be. This is why at top levels in any art form we have the pained and self-loathing artist, whereas at the bottom, anything goes and everyone is happy doing a slapdash job. Probably the best approach for the everyday magician is the middle path: concerned and interested, but not obsessive about getting it right.
The Message is the Magic
Marshall McLuhan famously stated, ‘The medium is the message’. When people first saw motion pictures they would have marvelled as much at the medium of film as the content of the movies. Whole societies have been shaped – how we work, travel, and relax – by technological media such as cars, television, and internet; it’s not what we look at but how we look at it that is McLuhan’s message. Magicians now learn from YouTube and video downloads rather than books, and this affects how they learn magic, what they learn, and how they understand it. Right-handed magicians are learning card moves left-handed (and vice versa) from YouTube, because they aren’t aware that the online instructor’s handedness is different from theirs, or they’ve been told it doesn’t matter (it does).
Which Cards to Use?
The choice of playing-card these days has never been greater. While the US Playing Card Co. have phased out some previously much-loved brands, others have been resurrected and many new custom designs are available. To help the newcomer decide, various factors need to be considered: