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Magic Show Notes
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Magic Show Notes
Magic-adjacent Feedback

This is the most recent entry, posted on 2024-06-26. Click here for the archive.
Why Magic-Adjacent Feedback?

I'm not a magician. I have a lot of magic knowledge and count a number of
professional magicians among my friends, but you won't find me joining a magic
organization or getting booked at The Magic Castle. I skirt around the edges of
the magic community, where I take on the role of observer. I have one foot
inside magic and the rest of my body outside, and that's where my value comes
from.

When magicians solicit feedback, it's almost always from other magicians. Plenty
of it is good, but the general problem is that the most knowledgeable magicians
are the ones who have been at it full time since they were children. And by
"full time" I mean they live, breathe, eat, and sleep magic, 24 hours a day. If
you want help with your diagonal palm shift or researching an obscure credit,
they're perfect. But they often fail to recognize "magiciany" things. Here's a
simple example: a performer may ask "may I borrow a finger ring from someone in
the audience?"

This is very weird. Normal humans do not say "finger ring." It's just "a ring."
To a magician, "finger ring" is perfectly acceptable because they need to
distinguish it from the Linking Rings prop. Now I know that audiences will
understand what you mean when you say "finger ring," but a heck of a lot of them
will be wondering why you said it that way. Even if a normal person needs to
make the distinction, they probably would say "a ring for your finger." Unless
your character is intentionally awkward or strange, you should use normal
language (Zabrecky is allowed to say "finger ring").

That's why it's important to get feedback from non-magicians. But it's difficult
to get people to provide good, honest criticism, and they'll mostly just say
something like "that was amazing, I don't know how you did it." So normal
audiences are not very useful.

You need someone in between. Someone who won't be blindsided by the effects and
can focus on the wider performance. Magic is a theatrical art, and should have a
director. But don't hire another magician to be your director (the list of
magicians that I feel can direct well is vanishingly small). When magicians
bring in other magicians as directors, I think it's because they don't want to
share their secrets with laypeople. And this potentially holds them back from
progressing from a good show to a great show.

"It's such a little thing," you may say. "Is it really that important?" No, not
really, not in the broad view of things. But equally so, magic is not important
either. If you are serious about your magic, you should be serious about your
presentation as well. And because it is such a little thing, why wouldn't you
put in the minimal effort to make the improvement?

If you can eliminate moments where your audience has to stop for a moment to
figure out what you are saying (words like "riffle" and "silk" come to mind),
they become that much more engaged. When things are a little off, audiences will
feel it even if they can't precisely express what the problem is.

In this post I've focused on simple word choices, because my educational
background is in Linguistics and the examples are straightforward. But much of
the same can be said for blocking, set design, and structure of both narrative
and metanarrative.

It's true, if you don't make these kinds of changes and continue with your
existing show, audiences will not think less of you. But if you do make such
changes, they may think MORE of you.

Updates

2024-06-26: Launched this site. I have lots of notes I've written over the
years, and I plan to put a new essay up every week or so over the next year.
Please join me in this experiment in human happiness.

Copyright © Chris Combs. All rights reserved.