Dec 18 2008
Working Conditions - Getting My Act Together
In his “Secret Session” seminar (which I had the fortune to attend), Jeff McBride made a great metaphor about cooking and magic.
You see, recipes are comprised of individual ingredients, tested, measured, blended and prepared just so to create something that tastes good.
If a magician was to create a cake the same way they create their acts, you’d see someone careening through the supermarket with a running commentary about how he likes THIS and THIS and THIS and THIS and some of THIS and THAT looks shiny and THAT looks interesting… and at the end of it all he takes all these boxes and jars of stuff into the kitchen, puts them in a big bowl and wonders why cake doesn’t happen.
I’ll admit right up front that when I initially created my act, I was driven by time constraints. I had six weeks before my first (EVER!) RenFaire magic gig, and I needed to pull something together. I went right to the Mark Wilson Complete Course in Magic (which you can look up, by the way, from the handy Amazon.com thingy at the top right of the main page) and pulled together about six things that involved rope. Why rope? Well, rope is inexpensive, packs small, and I hadn’t seen a lot of rope tricks being done at the faires I had attended. I also threw in Sylvester the Jester’s nifty Appearing Pole gag and I was off!
The first run of shows - six a weekend for three weekends - I don’t think I did the same set list for all six shows for any weekend. A lot of that was because I was, quite literally, making this up as I went along. Fortunately I think well on my feet (just ask any of my friends out at faire - see the “Wind Tobias Up and Toss Him on the Deck So We Can Rest” comment back in my “Getting Started” post) so I just… made stuff up to explain why I was doing all these weird things with rope. Two straw hats became Thinking Caps where, by concentrating, one set of ropes became equal and the other became uneven. My old padded ‘armored’ coat from my LARP days* became the “Coat of Loki”, leading to a rope escape perpetrated by an innocent audience member. Three ropes became a demonstration of Platonic Theory**… and so on, and so forth.
Aside: You can probably guess that I didn’t spend a lot of time using the “patter” provided by the writers of magic books when it came to the show. I believe that if you can’t talk about what you’re doing with your own voice, it’s probably not the bit for you and you should look elsewhere.
After surviving that first run, the act took a lot of twists and turns - helped, if that is the correct word, by a “working budget” which allowed me to pillage and plunder the magic shops and online magic vendors for their newewst, niftiest and shiniest things regardless of whether or not they suited my character, my act, my environment, or anything.
Another aside: Watch this blog for “10 sure fire ways to sell things to magicians”, a not at all kind or tactful rant coming one day when I’m in a particularly sarcastic mood. I’ll be speaking from experience, folks!
Eight years down the road (I’m rounding up, the anniversary will be in June, I think), I’ve found there’s a set of considerations I have to keep in mind when looking at new stuff…
- Portability - I have to schlep my gear to and from the site each day. If I’m working a long run faire and I’m not flying, I can drive up with a little lockable shed thingy to keep stuff in, but otherwise, everything comes on site with me, and leaves site with me.
- Angle-Proof - Faire is a 360 degree immersive experience. While we try to guide our patrons in their wanderings, people go darn near everywhere and they don’t stay in the areas designated for sitting when watching a magic show. Consequently, the stuff I do has to look good (or at least not look blatantly obvious) from every angle short of directly behind me and overhead… and I’m working on those last two.
- Period-ness - Ok. This isn’t as big a deal these days as it used to be when I worked the Northern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire - the Living History Center put the hyphen in “anal-retentive”, but it should not look too modern. I’m skirting a line with my big leather bag and the shiny metal stand I put it on -but that’s changing… too… heh.
- Cheap - Not as in “shoddy”, as in “inexpensive” or at least “cost-effective”. I’m performing at a Renaissance Faire for godsake - do I look like I’m made of money?
- The Tobias Nature - I’m not Criss Angel, I’m not Lance Burton, I’m not David Blaine and I’m not Jeff McBride****, the stuff I do on stage has to fit the character of a bombastic, sometimes bewildered, self-effacing overeducated galloot who’s everyone’s crazy friend Tobias. There are an incredible number of really good magic tricks out there which do not suit my character in the least.
…I’ve bought … about half of them. - Reset - I do three, sometimes four shows a day on stage, not counting random wandering about stuff. I need to be able to go backstage and “reset” (or at least “clean up”) and be ready to rock again in about five, ten minutes tops
Those are the criteria which have led me to my current magic act,. What’s really strange to me is the longer I do this, the less tricks I seem to do during my show, yet my show takes up the same amount of time.
I’ll talk about that soon, too.
* Yes, I was a member of the Austin chapter of Amtgard, later the High Fantasy Society. I have many skeletons in my closet, most of them just as embarrassing
** In which there is a Real World and an Ideal World and in the Ideal World all objects have their own Ideal Form***
*** See, I told you I went to college!
**** Even Jeff McBride has a hard time being Jeff McBride sometimes
