Mentioning the Message

About a week ago, I was at Jeff McBride’s home and we started talking about communication, when he asked me to write an article about ten ways to get your message across.  Enjoy! Give them what they want The audience you are delivering to wants to be told what they want to hear. If you make them sit too long, you have lost them. It is better to leave them wanting more.  As far as content...

First Impressions

You never know who you are really talking to. They could be a terrorist, or a great leader. Let me explain…. It started in Israel. A bomb had blown up in a tourist section of Jerusalem. Dozens of people were dead or injured and all of our major convention shows were cancelled. A young magician, born in Italy, now living in Budapest, named David, was in a challenging situation with the management...

Turn Up the Light

Magic is the shadow cast by the fire of the soul. — Michael Fraughton Dear student of the art, There are some who say that magic is a dance between shadow and light. There must be darkness to create mystery, true, but there must also be light in order to perceive it. One of the practical problems of darkness and light is encountered onstage. A PRACTICAL PROBLEM I often get asked by young...

Mario’s Top Ten Tips for Street Performing

I have been street performing for more then 15 years and I love what I do – it has allowed me to travel, teach, and perform at festivals all around the world.  It has  given me the training and experience required for me to gain work as a festival worker, cabaret performer, close up magician and write and perform my own one man show.  Everything I do stems from street theatre.  I have...

Mike Larkin Interviews Paul Draper

There are many highly specialized brilliant performers in the world of magic. Amazing stage artists such as Lance Burton, experts at the card table like Guy Hollingworth and masters of manipulation such as Juliana Chen. But modern day Renaissance man Paul Draper takes a different approach, proclaiming himself to be a perspicacious polymath. Despite ostensibly being a mentalist, the...

People Support What They Help Create

NO SPECTATORS One of the maxims I live by is “People support what they help create.”  This holds true in just about any organization, political movement, internet group, club and yes, even in the theatre or at a magic show.   I currently feel that the more audience participation there is in a show, the more successful that show becomes.  If you look at current Las Vegas shows, the ones that have...

Finding Inspiration Outside of Magic

It is no secret that many of us have too often seen multiple magic shows with performers reciting the same jokes with the same cliché lines or (the dreaded) performing a piece with someone else’s routine.  We know that this exists today in magic. We often make mention of how troublesome it is to go to a magic convention and see every act in the competition perform another card manipulation act...

Audiences: Remembering and Forgetting

I have come to the conclusion that there are two types of audiences: audiences that come to a show to remember, and audiences that attend a show to forget. It is amazing how different these audiences can be, and how their attention spans differ. An experienced performer can tell the difference between these two audiences and can change their performance style, script and even magic effect...

Selecting Magic to Perform

A few years ago, purely as a personal experiment, I asked myself the following question: In order for a particular piece of magic to make it into my performing repertoire are there any criteria that must be met? What features must this particular piece of magic have – or not have – for it to be something that I would like to perform? As I thought about it, several criteria did appear. I have...

The Best-Kept Secret in Magic

Imagine you are reading the trick section of one the magic magazines: The Effect: You have a magic experience that is profoundly transformational. Afterward, the world looks different to you, filled with fresh possibilities. Whereas before, your forward path was cloudy and unclear, you now feel inspired by new ideas, great, new performance material, and new friends. The Secret: . . . . Well,...