Month: December 2021

FRAME

We’ve got a LOT of ideas at this point about aesthetics for the show, material and ideas for content, and even larger thematic points to hit. But how should it all come together?

In about 99% of magic lectures/books/instructional stuff where magicians talk about “putting together a show,” it comes down to variety of tricks. Everything is driven by the innate characteristics of the effects themselves. This usually takes the form of maxims like “Start with something visual” or “Do something flashy then something about yourself.” There might be a section of a longer mentalism piece and magicians feel like we have to follow that with something different like a shorter piece of manipulative magic.

I’m generalizing broadly on this, but the idea holds: most magic “shows” are pieced together reactively; driven only by how one routine varies from the previous and the next.

And I’m all for texture and variety in a show, but it has always been strange to me that magic seems to be the only performing art where this is the norm.

A play isn’t written by alternating fast-paced scenes with long monologues. Musicians don’t release albums with the exact same structure of songs (Toe-tapper then a ballad then an anthem, etc.). That feels like a narrow, tactical view of how to create art.

Rather, these longform pieces are created driven by broader goals. Scenes in a play are driven by characters’ interaction (which in turn are informed by their goals and what the playwright wants to explore). An album release is trying to express the band’s current style and emotional truth in song. Or a live setlist (perhaps a better parallel) might try to balance the performers’ desires with the state of the audience in real time.

In our magic shows, we have a general Theme and a unique Slant to guide the aesthetics and help us identify our perspective we’re trying to include. Our goals hopefully include some artistic or creative aims (rather than purely business) to give us information about how or what we want to communicate with our audiences. And we could brainstorm content, tricks, presentations, and scenic elements all day, but how do they fit together into a show?

I lean on the concept of a FRAME. A frame is a real life experience that we can use as the structural backbone of the show. It provides a starting point of signpost milestones and general sections that can help us organize our elements into a show. That’s pretty vague so let’s jump into an example (for today, we’ll use an example from a show that’s already completed so I can explain it with clarity. Then next time I’ll work through the more fluid concepts for this show).

I did a virtual show last year that was all Themed around movies (a suggestion from a loyal audience member). My Slant was that movies feel like magic when they transport us into different worlds. My goals included learning the basics of video editing and putting on a high quality, passive livestream show rather than another interactive Zoom-show.

Keeping my goals in mind, I landed on the Frame of an Academy Awards Show / Oscars Night. The format of featuring many different people and movie clips would make my learning to edit videos easier than long videos. And having pre-recorded clips interspersed among live performance would bring a higher level of production value (costuming, setting, music, scripting, etc.) than would be possible in this particular live show alone.

What the Frame does is provide a parallel to (generally) superimpose the audience experience over. When you think of the Oscars, you probably think of commercials leading up to them, celebrity sightings, a red carpet, a fun host, lots of movie clips, suspense of awardees, and the big finale “best picture” of the year.

I decided to create a magic-themed awards show where we featured magic in the movies. It was presented with a bit of nonsense: with made up awards and silly scenarios of made-up scenes with magic that got cut from well known movies.

Knowing that the show was modeled on an Awards Night meant that I didn’t randomly assemble a setlist of mentalism effects with movie posters or a confabulation effect with celebrities. Rather, the Frame informed a loose character for me to play (host), guidance on the material (skits from movies which fuse magic into recognizable movie scenes), and the overall flow of the show (pre-show buildup and promotion -> welcome -> fun and different “small awards” -> best picture award.

The central benefit of approaching the pieces of your individual show this way is that they tend to fall in place to form a singular image rather than a piecemeal trick parade.

Every part of a show should inform (and should be informed by) all the other parts: the Frame is the unifying backbone of the show that connects all those elements. This examples is a relatively overt example (where the structural frame is visible to both the performer and the audience). But even when it’s nothing more than an internal guideline for the performer and the audience doesn’t see or hear about the frame, they feel its presence in the form of a well-structured performance.

REVIEW

Part of what makes for a well-crafted show is having components that are informed by each other. So taking regular stock of overarching artistic choices/goals is important to try and keep it all in mind. Here’s a brief recap to consolidate what has been (initially) decided as of now:

• Goals
  1. Create an Immersive-feeling, theatrical show
  2. Make that show financially sustainable
  3. Capture the process and develop promotion
• Theme: Heist (Art heist?)
• Slant: An art heist feels like magic because they both take clever thinking, detailed planning, meticulous practice; just to hide it all from public view. (This needs to be better – too vague and impersonal)
• Material: I started a running list of possible material/effects in a past post. I’m not putting much work into developing those at the moment, but when part of the Theme/Slant/Goals makes me think of an effect or a presentation, I’ll jot it down.

Longform breakdown: I see this show has being set in an interesting venue that feels mysterious, borderline sketchy, but well “set.” Parlor in size/presentation, the show would max out at approximately 50ish people (think through the finances of that) and would use heavily interactive pieces. The majority will be original card tricks which set up the premise of pulling off the perfect heist. The show is over when we’ve set the plan, established the skills/team, and pulled of the heist. It should probably have a twist ending!

Personal notes: This whole thing appeals to me because of the excitement of the heist. That feeling has broad appeal and attracts both the logical types (who want to be actively thinking or figuring things out) as well as those who lean more towards passive storytelling. My (personal) in-road could be about the jobs we have and how we define ourselves by them. We often ask someone’s name and then immediately “what do you do?” As though our job is a perfect reflection of us. I think about what I might do if I weren’t a magician and the only other jobs I’ve considered are librarian or art thief (maybe find similar job qualities or skills for all of these). This show could be more about looking at – not what we do – but what we wish we could do / want to do / would never do (etc.) as a better reflection of who we are. Who do we want to be? What do we WISH we could do?

Ending: We should pull off the perfect heist but then I sort of need to “put it away” and get back to why being a magician is better. Safer job? Little risk? Then the twist could be that I’ve pulled of a secondary/bigger heist on the audience themselves.

Takeaway: I’d like people to mostly enjoy the time at the show, but also take a look at themselves and what they wish they were doing with their lives. Not to make them question what they’re doing now, but maybe what could enrich their lives.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

• This came up earlier, but to clarify the “heist” concept, I think an art heist is more specific.
  • The cards become representations of the art pieces.
    • That, in turn, informs which pieces make sense to be card magic (those related to the Heist and required skills) vs. those which make sense as other forms of magic (i.e. team building). Card magic is like training for the heist.
• Next up should probably be the introduction of a “FRAME” that can fit with the reviewed elements at the top of the post. Most likely with be a literal “Art Heist Movie” frame, but these elements could shift a bit as the show becomes more about me, the audience, work/jobs, who we are, what we want to be, et.

SLANT

While our “Theme” discussion from last time may be incomplete, we have the core idea of “Heist” as our starting point. Later, we’ll look at the elements of a Heist (or perhaps a Heist Movie?) to find inspiration for the internal structure of the show, and we’ll take a look at what it may suggest for material/aesthetics/etc.

But for now, I think it’s important to (try to) identify something that goes hand-in-hand with our Theme: it’s Slant.

As with journalism, the Slant is an individual perspective on the (quite general) Theme. It would be easy to assemble a bunch of tricks that are – on their surface – related to the idea of a Heist. They could be linked with their props and their storylines, but the show as a whole (which is the final goal of what we’re doing here) would still be lacking. What it’s missing is the perspective of the artist.

I see this all the time with magicians (and others, but I’ll pick on magicians here because we can all use a bit of a critical eye). The “show” they put together is really more of a compilation of loosely related ideas. I hear regularly that a magician wants to make a “classy” or “elegant” or “fancy” parlor show. So they rent an expensive room, put together tricks that use (faux) heirlooms, “priceless” coins, “antique” cards, gilded objects or whatever the individual sees as “elegant.”

But the show never comes together because the artist shares no personal opinions on the content. They haven’t thought about what they want to say or what they’re trying to communicate, so the message defaults to “Hey! I like these things! Aren’t they cool?” Which is fine in an informal or short-form environment but simply doesn’t sustain an audience for a longer performance.

That’s where our Slant comes in. Our individual, unique viewpoint of a topic. The Slant should touch on why the Theme is important to us. What’s magical about it? What perspective do you bring that others haven’t explored. If I get stuck finding my Slant, I often try to fill in the sentence: ” _____(Theme)______ is magical because _______(Slant)_______.” Finding and element of the Theme that feels magical

Thinking about our Heist show, Heists feel like magic because so much planning and work goes in to creating something invisible that – if done correctly – no one ever sees. That needs some editing down, but it’s connecting with me as some sort of core concept for the show because it’s truthful from my point of view and it’s something most folks probably haven’t thought about before (because in most peoples’ work, they do a job and it’s transparent about who has taken which steps to accomplish which goals).

Other ideas to play with: A magician would pull off a heist by controlling attention.

RANDOM IDEAS

• As I spent time thinking through the Theme/Slant/Frame relationship, I wonder if the Frame might be a Heist Movie, the Theme could be something more like ‘Jobs’ or ‘What we do for a living’ (because of the Slant which touches on the ties between doing magic and planning a heist).
  • Most of this is only visible on the back end, so it’s more a logical restructuring for me and my priorities so I’m focused in terms of presenting information to the audience.
• Material Brainstorm Drop:
  • AKA: Aliases/code names
  • Card Transpo
  • Standing OOTW: Instincts
  • Total Coincidence:
  • T2P
  • Object to Impossible Location / Safe?
  • Ring Watch Wallet
  • Cards Across (moving objects secretly)
  • Gambling/NO combo Routine
• Question to think about: The set could be primarily card-based. Should I push it to be entirely cards? What does that suggest or mean in the framework of the show? If there are card tricks and non card tricks, is there a logic to when to use one vs. the other?
• Should probably end with the “perfect Heist” being pulled off, but then some sort of coda/kicker where the audience gets “taken” in some way
• I should really use more “air quotes”