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.