The Adequate Blog

I’ve talked about the necessity of having a sign if you’re a stage act - it identifies you as, yes, an actual show, and gives your show an air of “legitimacy” (oh look he’s someone who’s performing and not some random weirdo who walked out onto the stage).

I’d like to talk about another form of signage which I don’t see too often at the short-run faires, or in fact the long-run faires either - the Advertisement.

With a short-run faire, everything goes up and comes down in a weekend. You have one and only one chance to make your potential audience aware that you have a show in the next few minutes. For most of us, this involves doing a lot of hawking - but that shouting can blend in easily to the background noise of Fare - it is a shouty place, after all.

A few years back, I decided to take some of the marketing for magicians stuff I spent a stupid amount of money on (long story) and make up signs for myself, advertising my show.   Nothing really fancy - five minutes in PowerPoint generated a simple 8.5″ x 11″ landscape format sign with my logo, the show’s name, Tobias the Adequate, and the tagline “Dangerous and More Than a Little Stupid” along with the warning “Three shows daily” and a space for the location and times for the shows.

I’ll print up a batch of these on a fairly neutral colored heavy card stock and pack them along with some thumb tacks or a staple gun, and when I get onto site and learn where and when I’m performing, I scribble that information onto the signs and then walk the site tacking them to posts and trees and the like. There. Now I have ten to twelve additional indications that I’ll be performing, along with where and when.

Some guidelines:

• Some sites don’t want you tacking signs to their trees.  Make sure you check so you don’t end up breaking this rule.
• If you’ve made nice with some of the vendors (see previous blog post), you may be able to tack a sign up on one of their posts or uprights. This has the added benefit that said vendor may well talk you up to their customers.
• You don’t have to splash out for seriously Ye Olde Parchmente style paper for these signs. Neutrals - tan, light brown, khaki - will work fine.
• Print a few more signs than you think you’ll use. Because you’ll wind up using them too.

Go forth and promote!

A stage show at Faire has to contend with a lot of distractions during the show - especially if your stage is right in the middle of everything.  The biggest interruptions tend to be from parades.

Ah, parades. When some group or other moves en masse from one part of Faire to another - sometimes to do their own show, sometimes as the “local color” for the event, and sometimes… well… sometimes Her Majesty just wants to go “Walkies”… and The Queen Does Not Go Walkies Alone.

Having a large group of people move noisily through or just behind your audience area can be death for a pass-the-hat show. It interrupts the “flow” of the event, and if it happens at the wrong time… it can kill your “hat line”, causing the entire crowd to turn their backs to you to see what all that ruckus is about.

This isn’t a complaint, this is a simple fact of how these events work.  And there’s some times that you, as a performer, can do to help minimize the damage, or even turn the interruptions to your advantage.

• Get to know your timetables - if the event actually schedules their parades and progresses, get a copy of that schedule and compare it to your show times. This will give you some idea as to when the interruptions are likely to occur, and help you plan
• Get to know the paraders - If this is the first time you’re performing at an event, you’re kind of on your own with that. However, if you can, get in touch with the folks who lead these parades.  If they know you as a person as opposed to Some Guy on Stage, they’re more likely to be willing to work with you.
• When you can, turn it into a bit - If you know they’re coming, you can work it into the show.  I have a loose arrangement with the criers wherein, if they’re taking a parade past my stage, I can call out a number and they’ll ring their bells in unison that many times.  Now imagine how your crowd might take you asking them for a number, then making the criers ring that many times.  Suddenly, the parade’s not an interruption, it’s part of the show.
• When you can’t. evaluate and be flexible - Let’s be honest here, Her Majesty the Queen may not care about your show, and she may not stop to watch. If that’s the case, being a good citizen of the Shire and leading *your* crowd in a few lusty cheers of “God Save the Queen” won’t hurt your standing with the management.
• Don’t take it personally - Honestly, there is no secret cabal plotting to ruin your show. The nature of RenFaire is that there are things happenning all around all the time. No one is working to “wreck” your show. As much as we’d all like everything else to stop dead while we’re performing, it’s not going to happen. Whenever possible, work with the interruptions and make them something other than interruptions. Make them part of your show.

I’ve been thinking about how much stuff I tote around when I work Faires - I’ve mentioned before that I’m a great believer in infrastructure - but when it comes down to it, there is an ABM - an Absolute Bare Minimum - that I’d want to pack in and out.

If you’re starting to work / perform at faires, don’t have a full “kit”, and are looking to get the most out of what little funds you have for this wacky pastime, here’s what I recommend:

• A washable blanket - something along the lines of a stadium blanket or even a piece of polar fleece in earth tones or neutrals. You can use this as seating, a wrap, or to hide those pesky modern things if opening parade hits and your stuff is still in plain view.
• A tarp - for under your blanket if you’re on damp or mushy ground, or over your gear backstage to keep the rain or other nature off it
• A plate, fork, spoon and knife - I went about this the usual way by hitting the local thrift shops, but you lucky kids today can just go to your local socially and environmentally aware grocery store and pick up “disposable” bamboo plates and eating utensils for a fraction of what us old guys used to spend.  And bamboo is a wood product so it’s as “period” as necessary.
• A beverage vessel - another good cause for hitting the local thrift or charity stores - pewter, brass, even stainless steel if it doesn’t look too modern. Wood is great, but you’ll need to look into sealing the inside.
• Trash bags - because humans generate garbage, and your tarp may not be big enough once you’ve got stuff spread out
• A small, soft-sided cooler - For your food (you are going to be frugal and bring at least some of what you’re going to consume at faire, aren’t you?)
• Something to carry it all in - preferably something with wheels if you can manage it. These days you can get a pretty nifty rolling shopping card / folding box on wheels for not too much, and you will appreciate the slight increase in expense at the end of a 3 day weekend when you have to haul your gear alllll the way out to performer parking. Way… out… there.

Of course, there’s also your costume and other props, so you should factor that stuff into the capacity of your carrying thingy.   The good news is that everything I’ve mentioned can be bought “off the shelf” at thrift and sporting supply shops… or if you’re willing to spend a little more time, you can spend less money and get the raw bits and do some sewing and sawing to make a custom ABM kit.

… coming up on my 2009 Faire season, I thought I’d ramble off a short list (short - HA!) of my favorite things at Faire

• Watching the Site Go Up - yes, it’s a madhouse. Yes, I’m a stage act and as such, don’t always have to put together my own performance space, but it’s amazing and somehow reassuring to walk through what was an empty park and see it turn into a small, bustling village in a matter of hours.
•  The stars overhead at night -  Faires tend to happen in out of the way places. Places which don’t catch so much of the “light pollution” that big cities generate, so the stars are brighter, and more plentiful.
• That “New Privy” Phenomenon - Ok this one’s a little iffy but I’ll keep it clean. There’s a moment when you encounter a priv that has been cleaned recently enough that it is, in fact, freaking pristine and also dry* … and you’re the first one in there.  It’s like discovering the Northwest Passage and the Holy Grail all at once, my friends.
• The Renaissance Faire Soundtrack - find yourself a quiet spot backstage, pull up a bench or haybale, lean against a back wall, close your eyes, and listen - there’s so many layers of things going on… this also works out in the Real World.
• Smile - Nod - Yes I Know You From Faire - No I Don’t Remember Your Name Either - I don’t think I need to explain this one. But it tickles me nonetheless.
• The AfterShow - Unlike, say, shows in big cities, the AfterShow for me is a chance to sit down and review what happened. A chance to turn the personality back down to 6 from 11 (or possibly 12) on stage.
• The Bug Out After Faire - If I don’t have to haul myself to the airport ASAP, I love watching Faire come down - It just reminds me of the closing credits of The Sting… and that MASH episode “Bug Out”.  It doesn’t hurt that, again, I usually am not frantically tearing things down.
• The Traditional Stop at the 7-11 After the Day - For once I feel justified in buying that packet of red bites and the 1 liter of Diet Coke!

These are a few of my favorite things - what are yours?

* Privies or Port-a-Johns are cleaned through the vigorous application of water and cleanser. Through a hose. And a mop. And then the door is allowed to close. So drying occurs thorugh evaporation. Now you know… the rest of the story.

For a Renaissance Faire performer, “Season” starts locally when the weather is warm and dry enough to get hundreds of people out into a field for the day.  The Arizona RenFaire has already come and gone, Palm Springs has had theirs, and the Southern California Faire is getting ready to start it’s long season.

Up here in the Pacific Northwest, it takes a little while longer to get rolling. My first faire (pending verification) will be in April with Faire in the Grove , at a new location in Forest Grove, Oregon.  Once Faire season starts, though, it moves along at quite a clip - even one and two weekend events start stacking up once the weather gets nice.

So, it’s in a Rennie’s best interest to make certain his gear is in good working condition before the fireworks really begin. Here’s what I do:

•  Verify as many gigs for the season as possible as early as possible.  This can be tricker than it sounds because some of these short run faires don’t nail down their schedule and roster until perhaps a month in advance.  I use a couple of calendars to track the madness - one big “year on a page” unit and a smaller one which has a lot of pencilled in gigs.
• Check over your costume! No one wants a costume malfunction in the middle of the run, so check your outfit’s seams, closures, pockets (remember pockets!) and all the accessories you hang off your working clothes. And clean your boots. They need it.
• Check your gear! This is extremely important for magicians - make sure the stuff you plan to do is in good working condition - scissors sharp, tables stable, rings still … ring-shaped (if you’ve seen my show you’ll understand that one of my rings has a slight kink in it from ricocheting off countless stages for 7 years).
• Stock up on consumables! Do  you “demo” at Faire? Get your yarn, string, rope, or leather together and if you can, get enough to last the season. The same goes for nonperishable (or long lasting) cooking supplies, paper and ink for calligraphy, and so on and so forth.
  “Overstocking” is much better than “understocking”. For me, it’s rope. Magician’s rope, to be specific*. And paper napkins, and extra Crystals of Mystery.
• Rehearse! Do the bits you can do - I go over my tricks and routines, look over the outline of my show, and make sure I have contingency plans in case the performance space or the environment prevents me from doing certain bits.  If you “demo” - Make sure you can still do that craft before you’re out on site in front of patrons! Rehearse your songs - at the very least listen to them a few times!
• Make sure your infrastructure’s in place.  Does your SO know when you’re going to be at Faire? Family? Do you have pets and, if so, is someone looking after them? Is someone going to get your mail if your out of town for a long run? How about your car? Your home?  Do you have reservations for flights / hotels / rental car? Make ‘em early. You’ll probably save money doing so.

… Magicians know that what you do before the show is just as important as what you do during the show. I think this carries over to all forms of performing. Including Faires.

.. Oh yeah! According to the Blog Control Panel, this here is my 100th post! So that’s kind of a cool milestone. Huzzah!

* This is the one place I’ll break my own rules about Cheap Magic - for what I do, there’s a particular type of coreless magician’s rope that works beautifully for what I do and I can get it cheaply.

 With things being what they are, I’m planning on taking myself to our local outdoor weekly craft market and trying my hand out there.

As I started to do my research (because that’s what I do), I found there are  a lot of resources available for “Street Magic”.

Unfortunately most of them are  not that good.

The reason they aren’t that good is that they use this odd definition of “Street Magic” which is based entirely off a TV special put forth by one David Blaine. This special had Mr. Blaine walking about LA and performing magic tricks for non-studio audiences in a non-studio environment. He called it “Street Magic”.

Now that’s all well and good, but it wasn’t entirely accurate. “Street Magic with an entire TV crew, producer, a 300 lb bodyguard and the knowledge that if you stuck around you’d become famous on TV” was a bit long as a title, though, so they cut it back.

Real street magic is what’s called “busking” - performing to gather a crowd, entertain them, and at the end of the show collecting money from your appreciative audience.   Note that at no time did Mr. Blaine ask for money from his audiences. This is because he was being paid by the producer of his TV special.

The rest of us … are not that fortunate.

more “street magic” stuff tomorrow

Part of my “Organic Magic” manifesto stems from my background in theatre and faire - as we know, improvisation is a big part of the performing philosophy at Faire.

Improvisation, in my world, is bricolage - and I’ve talked about that as well - taking advantage of what you already have  and putting things together in new and creative ways.

All magic can be broken down into simple categories - appearances, disappearances, transformations, restorations, divination, and breaking the laws of physics.

So… what kind of “magic” might be performed by a wandering, slightly confused and befuddled conjuror strolling about an English village during a festival?

I decided to start with the basics - what do I need, and what do I have?

An itinierate conjuror needs to eat and drink…   so I started working on ideas involving food, drink… and of course, shameless self-promotion.

As I mentioned yesterday, I intend that the magic my Tobias character performs between shows (ie: hawking or “trolling for eyeballs”) at faire be different from what he does on stage.

Thinking about it has driven me to develop this theory of “Organic Magic”

Organic Magic is magic which just happen with what’s in the performer’s environment, with a minimum of pretention.

That sounds pretty heavy. Let’s break it down farther.

Magic is, as a performing art, the manipulation of the environment to achieve results which do not appear to be within the realm of possibility.   This means controlling the environment in such a way that my audience (ie: everyone) doesn’t see the line between my action and the unexpected result.

So the challenge of “Organic Magic” is to arrange the circumstances so well that the opportunity for magic occurs natuarally and without contrivance.

There are some big challenges inherent in trying for this kind of approach in an environment such as a Renaissance Faire - it’s outdoors, there are hundreds of people doing hundreds of things.

So this involves a certain amount of preparation, and a certain amount of improvisation. I’ll discuss my analysis of those factors this afternoon.

Choosing the tricks you do on stage is one thing - then comes choosing what your character might do out and about on site when not on stage - or at least not performing an officially declared show.  In event entertianment, that’s sometimes referred to as “atmosphere”.

The hook I use when thinking about “atmosphere” magic is that Tobias may in fact be magical, but he doesn’t realize  it. This also explains why he does big silly loud magic on stage which works even if he doesn’t do it right.

So when he’s out and about (ie: when Matthew the Magician is “trolling for eyeballs”) the magic he performs is stuff he does as a sort of offhanded fidget…

To make it more challenging, I decided that I needed to come up with an approach where Tobias does magic because that’s just how things work in his world.

That’s what led me to the idea, or at least the long ramble coming up, on “Organic Magic”.  Magic which happens with the least contrivance possible.

More on that  tomorrow.

As I said yesterday, backstory helps you decide - sometimes at a moment’s notice - the actions taken by your character.

For me, choosing magic tricks to perform hinges on one question:

Does this trick have the Tobias Nature?

“The Tobias Nature” … well, based on what I know about my character, I know that the magic in a Tobias show frequently happens in spite of  his actions or intentions.

So, tricks in which the character of the magician is in total control of his circumstances… aren’t going to work for me.*

That statement is a little misleading - the story of the trick can’t have Tobias 100% in control… for example, in the “pop knot” routine, Tobias cuts the rope and can never seem to get ‘em cut equally - and yet the trick goes right anyway.

More on material this afternoon.

* Of course, the Magician himself is in control of as much as possible. We just don’t let people know it. Except on blogs. Heh.