Magic (The 5th Elements)

"Presentation" A great magic starts from a great presentation. Presentation will affect the strength effect of your performance, and story-telling is one of them. Not only that, highly-acclaimed performers such as Jean Pierre Vallarino, Shoot Ogawa, or Brian Tudor are the three names of the winners for close-up magic award that rarely share or discuss about their performances. This gives us a proof how presentation cannot be measured merely from telling stories.

"Misdirection" or mostly referred by us as “MD” is a concept widely used by performers to maintain and control the attention, focus and direction of thought from our audience that is interacting with us as the performer. It is essentially fundamental to completely understand and master this aspect in the art of conjuring, as this will greatly help our performance to be more convincing, mysterious, and will create an impression with a deeper meaning. “Misdirection” is a concept, not a detailed and accurate explanation of a process. Misdirection has a strong and powerful role for your performance. Of course, as the performers, we have seen the Coin and Glass Routine. Yes, a brilliant routine and has a meaningful method of misdirection. Performer claimed that he will vanish a coin that is laid on the table using only a clear glass and wrapped by a piece of newspaper. Once the audience pays their focus on the coin, the performer covered it, then boom!, eventually the glass has gone from the performer’s hand. Here we can clearly recognize how important the use of misdirection for performers. As a close-up magic performer, I use this method to allow myself to execute complicated or simple sleight of hand that is not supposed to be seen by the audience. Steve Cohen, in one of his books, shared a story that when he was really young; he once tried to hide one of his mother’s coins. What he only did was held it into his fist when he made eye contact with his mom without even once looked at his hand. Yes, eye contact plays a really important part in this method. Audience will always focus onto where the eyes look at and unconsciously follow where your eyes look.

"Time-leap" Time-leap can also be referred by the missing timeline: a process where an audience will purely not be aware of things that had just happened. This method has a close correlation with misdirection. The missing moment or moment that is not captured by the audience’s memory, will act as if something magical has just happened. Have you ever met a lay person who told to their friends that they just saw a conjurer (magician) pushed his cigarette through a coin, their coin that had been clearly signed by them? This is one of the examples where Time-leap works well. The audience will confirm to everybody that listening to them how the performer had been able to push the cigarette to the coin. They will also skip the moment where the performer actually switched their coin with performer’s coin.

"Climax" is the highest effect of your performance. This part is sometimes referred as “kicker” or a suprise effect from a routine and oftenly this part is placed at the end of a routine as an ending. This aspect is not only applied in the art of conjuring, but as well in every movie we watch on TV or at the cinema. They use this aspect as the ending. This element will leave a deep meaning and strong mark in the memory of your audience.

"Way-out” It cannot be denied that human do mistakes. Sometimes shit do happens. Mistakes will take place not only because the performer’s fault but sometimes because of the audience fail to follow the proper instruction from the performer. However, there is an unwritten rule of thumb that “Audience is always right” because they are the one that enjoying our performance. One should really pay a good attention that ”Plan B is not enough”, so when we failed to continue using Plan B, which we had prepared before, we would still have Plan C, D, and so on. There is no exact tutorial to train our way-out. This aspect is purely we gain along with our experiences in performing. The way I do is by practising and keep practising with one to three routines with different audiences so then we will understand more of things that are possible to happen.

Ps. This note is not sacrosanct. It’s opinionated. 

Sincerely.. Maximillian Carl