Tag: Theory

A quick reprieve from “ShowCraft” before diving into a long series of bad first-draft scripts (buckle up).

I’ve been submitting a lot of grant proposals of late, and in tandem with that, taking a class and doing some reflecting on the business side of my work. What all of that has led to is a lot of time thinking about my Purpose/Vision/Mission/’Why’/any other term encapsulating my reason for existing. While I’m having some trouble identifying that particular portion, I’ve clarified (en route), some ideas about what defines my work.

I’ve come to think of these as Tenets or Pillars of my practice (I can’t decide which term is best quite yet). These are the characteristics that – in my ridiculously wide portfolio of projects and forms of work – are constants. They reflect (part of) what I believe about the world, life, people, and performing; so they don’t change as regularly as the topical themes of a project. These Pillars govern the type of work I create and how I go about creating it.

So, I present for your consumption, my Tenets:

• Intention: How I design. I curate cohesive experiences that are fully thought-out and that show immense care for the participant. Intention gives art structure.
• Storytelling: How I connect. I use storytelling techniques to communicate the theme and ideas of the project effectively. Storytelling communicates meaning.
• Curiosity: How I entertain. I use Wonderland-eque levity to intrigue the audience, introduce the unexpected, and make sure the experience is fun. Curiosity makes art intriguing.

My projects might have varying degrees of each of these guiding principles, but they’re so deeply engrained in who I am at this stage of my career, that they all pop up in each endeavor I undertake.

What are the characteristics that define your work?

OK, I recognize there’s a lot of seemingly disparate ideas here, both theoretical and practical. As I describe my ideas of ShowCraft to other performers, I find myself needing a more concise way to describe it, so here’s an attempt:

ShowCraft is actively choosing WHY to perform certain pieces WHEN.

Several folks I’ve chatted with hear things like “show design” and immediately think that means adding sound, lights, choreography, scripting, etc. And these are all elements of a show. But they’re not what makes a show a show. At its core, a show (like in theater, movies, even books) is driven by artistic intention an purpose.

Think about your magic routines and fitting them together into a set or a show in the past. You probably put a quick flashy trick up front, and then some story-based pieces in the middle, and maybe something big and impressive at the end. But other shows aren’t written like that.

That would be the equivalent of writing a moving script entirely in standalone scenes that don’t relate to each other at all. Maybe the main character is constant between them (or a better parallel could be the actor is the same but playing different roles in those scenes), but they’re going to be inherently disjointed.

Now don’t get trapped thinking that the solution is transitions. They’re helpful and necessary, but transitions don’t make a show either! Taking 10 unrelated scenes and forcing character overlap or common story elements isn’t going to make a cinematic masterpiece.

To create a full show, the show itself needs to have an arc; a trajectory driven by intention and goals. Those are what allow us to check and see if our individual pieces, with their respective presentations, and the transitional glue holding them together, are the right choice to move our show from beginning to end!

ShowCraft is actively choosing WHY to perform certain pieces WHEN.

I have a lot of thoughts about magic. Because I spend a lot of time thinking about it.

I often compare magic with other art forms to try and identify key differences that set magicians apart and to look for areas where we as mystery performers/magic-doers/whatever we call ourselves can improve the quality of our work as a community.

Here’s a problem I see with magic that goes to how exclusive it can feel sometimes. When you look at a field like visual arts, there are so many ways to “appreciate” it. A person can walk into a museum, go up to a painting and immediately say “I like it” or “I hate it” and walk away. And that’s a completely valid way to approach art (personal preferences).

But there are so many other groups with different ways of looking at it. Some people can walk up and examine the technique – looking at the composition and the brushstrokes and appreciate it from that perspective.

Other people might look at the historical context or physical location of the piece to look at it as a lens for cultural understanding.

And every spot on that spectrum from personal preference to codified learning is a valid way to look at it. Most importantly, this wide swath of ways to interact with visual arts means that there are loads of in-roads to experiencing it.

With magic, we feverishly guard our secret techniques. Our methods are only for magicians, and all the work that goes in behind the scenes is jealously protected. I completely understand that there’s a breaking point (where sharing the method of the trick as you’re doing it negates the experience of magic), but there have to be ways to make our art more inclusive for people searching for different perspectives and experiences.

We limit our audiences to one tiny end of the spectrum where they can – basically – only say “I liked that trick” or “I didn’t like it” and some justification that may or may not be informed by fact.

We make room for magicians to look at all the surrounding elements that make up our art, but I don’t think we’ll progress as far or as quickly as we could until we find thoughtful ways to open our community to non-magicians.

The more (varied) perspectives, the richer and more textured our art becomes!

Plenty of art forms have their own definitions of Criticism and Critique. In any journey of artistic self-improvement, these are important ideas to recognize because they can be used to help us edit our work. Here’s how I understand them:

CRITICISM is unhelpful. It focuses on the person and what they’re doing incorrectly. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t take those personally and would channel the thought behind the point given into useful change. But we’re humans so we don’t do that.

Criticism comes across feeling like a personal attach because it suggests that the decisions the artist made were wrong in some way.

CRITIQUE – on the other hand – is about the work. It looks at the work as objectively as possible and examines how well it achieved its goals. It takes the intention of the creator into account but focuses on the piece rather than the person.

Critique is what we all need to hear (yes, all of us) without taking personally because it’s generally coming from someone who wants to see us improve. And often, those outside perspectives are much more objective than our own since we’re so close to the piece.

One final note on critique: getting input from experts is great. Listen to what they have to say and the rationale behind it. But critique from laymen and random people is still valuable. An idea I like to keep in mind (and I forget where I first heard it) is that when it comes to critique, people are almost always right; and when it comes to their reasons behind that critique, they are almost always wrong. So listen to what they have to say because it’s based on their (valid) perception!