“What the eyes see, the heart believes.”
(Dai Vernon, aka The Professor. One of the finest magic minds of all times)
A deck of cards - my bridge to magic
It all started with a simple trick taught by a friend, followed by my first card magic book, co-created a magic club and went on spending countless hours practicing mostly card magic. A deck of cards, an everyday object, which acts as bridge between our rationally obsessed world and the one of magic.
I seek to create unique moments for people. If my audience can suspend their belief for just a moment, magic happens. It’s not about fooling others, it’s being playful with our mind.
How magic impacts my practice
Reading the room and connecting - when you perform magic, you have to be able to connect with your audience effectively and bring them along the journey with you. As you arrive at a table (I am mainly doing table magic), you need to understand the momentum, the dynamics at play, who’s the table leader, who needs to be involved more than others.
Creative problem-solving - there isn’t one way to achieve a magical effect and many paths can lead to a similar result. Magic is about researching better and more effective ways to achieve the effect. And the question is how do you get to the results using the principle of “economy of movement”.
Leading in the now - you can have a scenario and a plan but when you in front of an audience, you can’t control everything. And for magic to be preserved, you can’t put too many constraints on your spectators. Quite the opposite, it’s best to adapt. But for that, you need skills to adapt. Improvisation works when you have the skills to do so.
Continuous learning and improvement - when you perform, the feedback is instateneous. In that way, you learn on the go and if you are performing several times in an evening, you have the opportunity to adapt and improve on the spot. In addition, once you are done and you are back home - practicing - you have to use your learning and reflect on what happened (chosen techniques, modus operandi, audience, setting, body language, etc)
Smart risk-taking - as you practice a routine or a move, there is a moment when you need to get it out there. You have to try it out in front of real audience and see how it works under those conditions. It’s about choosing the right setting so you have good chances to be successful.
There are many more things you learn on the way and if we ever meet, let’s have a chat about magic.