How to make your magic more understandable?

If you wonder why, despite countless hours of practice, your magic doesn’t slay audiences the way you envision it to, try slowing down your performance. Your magic might just be over speeding and difficult to understand.

Most close-up magicians in the Philippines, especially those who perform card and coin tricks, move at breakneck speed. They think they have to outpace people’s eyes to deceive them.

The result is that the audience sees coins cavort from one hand to another, cards go up and down the deck, change colors, disappear and reappear, but people don’t really understand what’s going on. To them, everything seems to be a blur.

Give your audience some breathing space, so they can swallow and digest the performance. Don’t smother them with machine-gun fire magic. Magic is not a serve-and-volley tennis game where you have to serve the ball at radar-busting speed to get past your opponent.

Magic needs less brute force than that. It is about smoothness and naturalness. Speed is not natural. Even if a performer successfully executes his sleights at supersonic speed, his audience will still know something happened out of the ordinary. They don’t know what exactly happened, but they know something did. A mere suspicion of the method breaks whatever illusion you may want to create.

Slow down your performance. Try to tell a story. To be entertaining, magic should tell a story. Never mind if its plot is tenuous, it should move along a line that audiences can follow, understand and empathize with. For that matter, your performance must have a beginning, a middle and an end. Beginning: Here’s a handkerchief in my right hand. Middle: I close my hand around it, and it’s gone. End: The handkerchief travels through time and space, and it’s now in my left hand.

Most magic tricks don’t have such a well-defined structure. In most cases, the stages overlap, leaving the performer clueless as to where he is exactly at certain points of the performance. Still, if he takes his time to bring his audience through these stages at leisurely pace, his audience will understand better the story he wants to tell through his magic.

Some magicians move fast from stage to stage of their performance, execute their sleights at Guinness Book of Records speed, because they fear detection. The result is that they get away with the sleight but at the expense of leaving their audience confounded. What the heck was that all about? they mutter to themselves as they go away. The performance confused them, and the magic failed to amaze them.

You may have heard of the much bandied-about attributes of a magician, namely, that magicians have quick hands.

This is partly true, because many magicians, fearful of being caught, execute their sleights rapidly. Deep in their subconscious they may be saying, “Never mind if the audience don’t get the point of my performance, as long as they don’t catch the secret moves.” These performers are thankful of the little blessings they get.

One good way to determine if you are moving faster than needed is to shoot a video of your performance. The video will show your mastery of the basic moves. It will also allow you to see the possibility of slowing down the performance without compromising both the sleights and the clarity of the magic.

Learn to pause at the right places and slow down a bit. Provided you have good eye contact with the audience and your misdirection techniques are excellent, you’ll sail right through your performance without getting caught. The best part is that the spectators understand what’s going on, because the right pacing and the pauses give your magic clarity.