> Sometimes you can make something appear magical by spending far more time on the effect than anyone would ever think to do.
This is as good a definition of stage magic as anything, I suspect.
This is as good a definition of stage magic as anything, I suspect.
Rory was a master class mentalist — literally world famous. When other world class magicians were on the continent or passing through they'd come visit him. Invariably, he'd make them do a 10m opener for the class (usually mentalist, illusion, and close up). Did I mention the class average was a C?
Anyways, for the final, Rory did his trick: he chatted to us for a few minutes, drawing a picture; then we all had ~30s to draw a picture. Then, he chatted with some people — kinda at random — then picked one person to seal their picture in an envelope. At the end of the class was the reveal: he'd drawn this picture the girl drew. More importantly, just about everyone drew the same picture.
Then he made his point: depending on how he was feeling, there were about a half dozen pictures he could get an audience to draw.
Eye opening.
I keep dice on my desk for generating random digits.
And then... in the final minute or so of the show all of those seemingly random distractions and tangents come together to tie up the various stories and jokes he'd been telling! Decades later when I think about it it still blows my mind. They can't have been random at all. I've no idea if the various distractions were plants, or maybe they never existed at all and everyone in the audience just thought we were all too far away to hear whoever he was talking to? It was such a flawless execution though, only heightened by the fact he'd convinced you he was a rambling unfocussed mess for most of the night.
So it's a bit different, but not that different, to just riff off the cuff in realtime.
Essentially: there are two ways to make something appear magical.
- One is a gimmick (physical or otherwise), which is performed so well as to be invisible to the audience.
- The other is simply doing something effortlessly that seems impossible without spending years of practice... but having actually spent years of practice on it.
He cited some Teller trick that Teller brute forced by just practicing the movements for an entire year until he could do them reliably and flawlessly.