Serenading, Part 2
/Okay, here are some examples of the Serenade style of performance I wrote about a couple of days ago.
I mentioned two primary orientations for performing in this manner.
Close-up, but with a window between you and the audience.
They’re outside, maybe on a porch or balcony, but they’re some distance away.
The first situation is pretty straightforward. You can just do any sort of close-up effect you might normally do in-the-hands, that doesn’t require physical interaction with the spectators. But you might as well take advantage of the situation and do something that’s not examinable. Those gimmicked decks or gimmicked packet tricks that can be very suspect in a regular performance work much better in this situation. I mean, people may still suspect there’s something fishy about them, but at the very least the fact that they can’t examine the object makes some sense. Whereas in real life it makes zero sense.
If the idea of doing gimmicked magic through a window sounds familiar, it may be because I recommended that sort of staging years ago in the post Youtube Magic in the Real World.
There’s an idea I mention in that post that I had forgotten about. You take a dry erase marker and make a circle on your side of the window. Then you display an object (a card, a coin, a pack of gum) outside of the circle, but when you move it inside the circle it changes in some way. If you had something that could change back and forth easily, here’s what I would do… Let’s say it’s a card. Outside the circle it’s an ace. When you move it in the circle it’s a Jack. Pull it back out it’s an ace. Put it back in, it’s a jack. Now, while it’s still in, you erase the circle from the window. And now the card is permanently a jack. As if you were opening some sort of portal and then you erased the portal leaving the card in its altered state.
When it comes to tricks to do at a distance, I prefer not to do tricks that were designed to be performed that way. What I mean is, I wouldn’t do a rope trick, because most rope tricks are perfectly well suited to be done from 20 feet away. I wouldn’t do a platform style trick. I want to do a close-up trick where the distance becomes an added element to be dealt with.
One trick I’ve done a few times is Gemini Twins. I will call the person and ask if I can stop by and show them a trick “from a distance.” I tell them to get a deck from their house and start mixing the cards and I’ll honk my horn when I’m there and they should come outside. When I arrive, they come outside with the deck and I walk them through the procedure. I have them spread through the cards while they’re facing me so I can “see what cards I’m drawn to.” I stay as far away as possible. I would guess at least 30 feet or so. I use the camera on my phone to zoom in so I can identify the indexes of the cards. I’m yelling. They’re fumbling. They may have to squat to deal the cards in a pile on the ground. Or they deal onto a bench or the hood of their car or any flat surface. Cards are sliding. Cards are blowing. It’s all a bit of a clusterfuck, but that’s what makes it so good. I’ve often done Gemini Twins without touching the deck myself in a normal close-up situation, but for some reason it seems to hit even harder when I’m so far away. There’s no logical reason it should, but it does.
For a mentalism sort of thing, what I’ve been doing is something like Wiki-test or Xeno. But I start the effect remotely. From my house. So they have a thought in their mind that I apparently couldn’t know. I concentrate, but fail. I ask them to go outside their house and I’ll go outside mine (to get a stronger mental signal). That fails. I tell them not to forget their thought and ask if I can come over. “I won’t come inside. I just need to be closer. I thought I might be able to do it from here, but I’m getting nothing.” I drive over. They come out. I’m standing as far away as I can without being in the road. I ask them to concentrate. I’m still getting nothing. “What the hell? Are you seriously even thinking about it?” I ask. I walk closer and closer. When I’m about 15 feet away it comes to me. As if I’ve finally entered into their “thought radius.” At this point I don’t struggle. I don’t go letter by letter or anything. It’s just obvious. “Oh, you’re thinking of fish. Tuna fish.” Or whatever.
I like this because it feels like how mentalism should work. It should be that there’s some distance at which you can perceive thoughts, and at a greater distance they’re out of reach. We tried something from our respective houses; that didn’t work. Then we both went outside; that didn’t work. We got closer and closer until finally I was able to pick up on the thought. That seems reasonable. It’s fun to try and make something feel both fantastical and logical. And it gets people thinking away from the actual method.
I think there are endless variations you could come up with of ways to play off the physical distance in your performances. When I first started doing this and I was performing for people on their balconies at my apartment complex, I would have them write the word they were thinking of on a piece of paper, fold it up into a small packet and then dangle it down at the end of piece of string or thread (one person hooked it on a fishing line) so I could get close to it but not close enough that I could touch. So here I’m “sensing” what’s written down (not reading their mind) supposedly. But I just need to get closer to the paper itself. The staging adds so much to the trick. Them leaning over the balcony, fishing the word down to me; me with a hand reaching towards the sky looking up at them, and then somehow divining the word that’s still suspended out of my grasp. The trick becomes tied to the staging, and the staging is tied to this moment in time. And that’s a structure you can use to make your magic stronger and more memorable in or out of a pandemic.
