stage magic – Page 36 – MagicShow.Tips

Great Visit!

The other day I visited a magician friend who isn’t doing too well from health standpoint. I drove several hours each way to visit him. It really lifted his spirits, we had a good time jamming and laughing. If you know another magician that’s not doing well, pop by and visit them.

One of the things we chatted about was my silk and coathanger routine. This is something that I’ve been working on all summer and have hit a wall. The problem I’m having is that the trick gets stunned silence. Each phase adds to the stunned silence. The problem is getting a reaction out of it that’s not silence.

My friend who is known as a close up guy, but has amazing knowledge of stage magic gave me a great suggestion. He said the trick is lacking the release of tension. Instead of looking for a finale to the trick, blow it off with a laugh. Now I just need to figure out what that blow off it and to try it.

Big Stages

The variety show that I was in last night was a lot of fun. A couple of the acts were thrown off by how wide the stage was. The stage was probably 24 feet wide and 8 feet deep. I personally don’t mind a wide stage, but work on them fairly frequently. The picture above … Continue reading “Big Stages”

The picture above is form the venue last night. You’ll notice one of the things that I do is “define my area” on the stage. My case and table create the edges of where I work. This keeps me from wandering the stage to get props if my case or table were at either end of the stage.

Having a wider stage is way better than a narrow stage where you are crammed into. Currently I’m working hard on my show to play larger. I’m not a pack small, play big person. I prefer to use props that fit what I want to do…but hopefully make it play large!

Adding Texture to Predictions…

A friend of mine who is a mentalist from Ireland is in town and we had coffee yesterday. We were chatting about mentalism and the struggles to make it play big. One of the things he showed me was probably the coolest thing I’ve seen this year (more on this in a minute).

Part of the challenge of mentalism is you need normal-ish looking props. Once you know make a die 24 inches big, or use a calculator that’s build for bigfoot, you lose what makes mentalism great, which is the lack of propy props.

This is where what he showed me comes in. He showed me Phil Smith’s Quinta Force.

This is an amazing way to force one object out of five that feels very free and has some theatrical build up to it as well.

My idea is to borrow five different objects from people in the audience. You introduce a padded envelope that has your prediction in it. They give you a number, let’s say it is 28. You count to that number per the Quinta Force and let’s say we end up on a cellphone. You open the envelope and inside is a cellphone…then for the kicker on the back written in marker in giant numbers is 28!

I haven’t finished reading the book, so someone may have thought of this already.

That’s something that will play fairly large, I guess it could be done with paper prediction that unfolded into a large display. My thinking was to try to get away from a printed prediction as that’s fairly common way to reveal things and I wanted something that would add some texture to the show.