Theory to Practice
Theory to Practice
By Jeff Stone
We’ve all read magic books and/or watched magic DVDs. We’ve even been impressed enough by some of the material to try to add it to our arsenal. Often, however, magicians rush into performing new material. You definitely need to perform for a real audience as part of fine-tuning your skills. However, you also must carefully practice and study the material before presenting it.
What follows is a modified excerpt from my E-Book, Stone Cold Magic, which happens to be on sale right now. 🙂
Root:
Let’s remember our roots. The root is honor your craft by putting in your time to master the moves and the effect before performing for real audiences. This can be broken down into 8 steps. These steps are referring to reading a book, but you can see how you could easily modify them for a DVD:
- Muddle through the book
- Read the book
- Learn the Mechanics
- Pick the effects you like
- Technically master the chosen effects
- Develop your presentation
- Create your routine
- Perform for real audiences
Branch:
Let’s build our branches. Let’s take the theory of reading a book and put it into action. What follows is a detailed break down of each step. You goal for the next 30 days is to pick a book or a DVD that has a handful of tricks that you would possibly consider adding to your “bag o’ tricks.’ Pick just one book/DVD and follow the steps below.
Step One: Muddle through the book.
You’ve already done this. You read parts and tried some of the moves, and you looked at some of the pictures. You got out your cards and coins and hankies, and you played around and read part of or all of the book. That’s step one; just get through it.
Step Two: Read the book.
You may have already done step two, but probably not. Simply read the book from cover to cover. Look at the illustrations as you go, but don’t even touch a deck of cards or coins or hankies. Just read and try to make sense of what you’re reading by looking at the pictures. Don’t turn the page until you understand everything you’ve read on the page you are reading. Step two is just read it.
Step Three: Learn the Mechanics.
This is the most time consuming and difficult step of the process. Read each effect, and walk through the moves and sleights until you understand them completely. Once you understand how to do the moves and sleights for the effect, continue practicing them until you can do the entire effect from setup to cleanup (start to finish) without referring to the book. Once you can do the effect 5 or 10 times in a row without the use of the book, move on to the next effect. Step three is to learn the mechanics.
Step Four: Pick the effects you like.
Once you can do all of the effects mechanically, without referring to the book, then you will choose the effects that you like the most. This can be based on how challenging the effect will be to master, how powerful you perceive the effect to be, how long it takes to perform, how easily “reset-able” it is, or a variety of other reasons. Go through the book, and find the ones that match your style and personality. Step four is to pick your effects.
Step Five: Technically master the chosen effects.
In step three, you memorized each effect, but you have not mastered each effect. Even if you think you have, you haven’t. This step is where you will master the selected effects you liked. Simply practice the mechanics of the effect until you are ready to puke.
You must constantly practice the mechanics of the effect until you can do it without looking (literally without looking). Have one of your magic friends or family members observe you mechanically perform the effect without looking. When you show them the effect, tell them that you are just practicing in front of them and not to expect any kind of presentation.
Just keep doing this until everything flows well and feels smooth and perfect. Then you move on to the next effect that you have chosen and repeat this step again until you have finished with all of your selected effects. Step five is master the motions.
Step Six: Develop your presentation.
When I was new to the magic field, I was a master technician. I could do all of the sleights and moves and I new thousands of effects. I interviewed Bill Malone for a job at a magic restaurant in Florida and was turned down because I had no personality. I’ve since learned how to develop a presentation to improve my magic. In fact I’ve spent so much time on this, that I’ve lost a bit of my technical skill, but trust me the audience remembers the presentation, not the technical skill.
This step is probably the most important, and it’s fairly simple. The other steps before this are a lot of hard work and practice. This part however, is simply to figure out what you are going to say and meld it into your already perfected mechanical presentation.
Figure out what you want the story to be and fit it into the effect. Then practice the heck out of “presenting” while doing the effect. Then practice the entire effect in front of your guinea pigs that you’ve been using through out the book. Once you’ve mastered an effect with presentation, then move on to the next effect. Step six present your presentation.
Step Seven: Create your routine.
At this point, you should have pretty nearly perfected about 5 or so effects. What you will find is that almost every effect whether in this book or another can give you a lead into another effect. Sometimes you have to get creative and come up with a transition, but generally speaking you’ll be able to link at least half (if not, all) of the effects that you’ve chosen from this book.
Link them together, and then work on the one liners that you may need to transition from one to the next. Once you’ve put them together, practice them to death and test them on your guinea pigs. In this step, you may find that you’ll want to add other effects that you already know and mix them in with the ones you’ve chosen from this book. Do whatever you need in order to make the routine flow together. Step seven is to create your routine.
Step Eight: Perform for real audiences.
Whether you’re a pro or you just like to goof around with magic, you need to perform your routine on real live audiences. It could just be non-magic friends at work or school. It could be at an actual show. I used to wear a button on my jacket that said, “You wanna see a card trick?” When I wore this button, people would always ask me to show them a trick. I’d show them one or two, then ask if they wanted to see more, and if so, I would continue on with my routine.
I’ve actually had the checkout stand girl at the grocery store ask me to show her a trick, so I held up the checkout line and showed her a trick. Don’t ask for feed back from real audiences, but you’ll get it anyway. Some of it is not verbal. Just be very aware of your audience’s reactions and make a mental note. You may have to go back to the drawing board. Either way, at this point you are a fully functioning magician. Step eight is amazing your audience.
That’s it. That’s the root. Now go study the classics, and go discover your true magical self.
How valuable was this article: