Dear Jerxy: Magician/Audience Balance
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Dear Jerxy: For the past few months I’ve been incorporating a lot more story-centric/audience-centric pieces in the the tricks I perform and I’ve been enjoying the different types of reactions I’m getting from these. Is there a particular proportion of audience-centric to magician-centric effects you like to have in your repertoire? Or do you not worry about that?
Signed,
Seeking the Right Balance in San Francisco
Dear Seeking: First, some quick definitions for newer readers.
Magician-Centric Magic: Is when the trick is (supposedly) achieved due to the magician’s skills or “powers” or abilities. This might be a legitimate skill - “Watch how I stack a winning poker hand in just three shuffles.” A legitimate-sounding, but fake skill - “I know where the coin is by reading your body language.” Or a more obviously fictional power - “With the wave of my hand, I can change the 3 of Hearts into your card, the Ace of Diamonds.”
Audience-Centric or Story-Centric Magic or Experience-Centric Magic: Is when the magician is showing something but not taking credit for it. Since magic tricks are inherently magician-centric, to not take credit for it the magician will have to create some alternative story for why what’s happening is happening. And in the process of crafting that story, the audience’s role should change from just watching a demonstration or a “show,” to one where they’re playing a more active role, even if the magician is still guiding the experience along.
Most magic is performed in the Magician-Centric style. That’s just the default that exists when people watch magic. If a dollar bill changes to $100, unless you come up with some sort of story about why this isn’t because of something you’ve done, then they’re going to give you the credit. That’s how magic works with people in this century.
To explain where I am now with incorporating these two different modes of performing, I’ll tell you the journey I took.
Phase One - All Magician-Centric
For the first couple of decades that I was interested in magic, I performed almost everything in a Magician-Centric style. That’s how most tricks are written up and performed by others, so that was what I knew. I didn’t even really consider there to be another way to perform. Magic was synonymous with “pretending you have a power that you don’t really possess.”
Phase Two - 95% Magician-Centric, 5% Audience-Centric
In the mid-2000s, I found myself really appreciating tricks where I wasn’t the focus of the effect—tricks where it wasn’t a demonstration of my own power. Or tricks like Chad Long’s Shuffling Lesson where the magician is knocked down a peg by the spectator. That type of trick felt really good to me and I would collect them whenever I came across them. But still, these tricks felt like an exception to how magic should be presented. And so I didn’t really strive to find as many different ways as possible for how to pull focus from the magician because these types of tricks still felt like anomalies to me.
But as I incorporated more and more into my repertoire I realized the strength of these routines. To whatever extent people have a negative view of magicians, it’s largely built around the Magician-Centric performance mode. “I can do something you can’t do,” is not an attitude that garners a lot of love. And it comes off even more ridiculous when people know you’re pretending to be able to do something they can’t do. Magician-Centric magic can very easily come off as an exercise in validation-seeking. In fact, for adults, it’s probably more likely to come off as that. As an amateur performer, if you’re not performing for someone who is predisposed to like you, it can seem more like “showing off” than entertainment. And after a while, even the people who do like you can get sick of “entertainment” that is built around the idea of how special you are.
And what I was finding at this time was that Audience-Centric magic seemed to prevent a lot of the negative assessments people had toward magic. They didn’t need to believe the Audience-Centric premise. You could blame what was happening on a “magic crystal.” Just the fact that you weren’t actively taking credit for it interrupted people’s knee-jerk reaction to see the trick as an extension of your ego.
Phase Three - 95% Audience-Centric, 5% Magician-Centric
So then I pretty much switched all my tricks or presentations to be more Audience/Story-Centric, as much as possible. Some tricks don’t fit that particular mode so I mostly discarded them from my repertoire and held onto a few that I just enjoyed too much to stop doing completely.
Phase Four - Present Day
On a trick-by-trick basis, going primarily Audience-Centric worked well. But after a while I realized that, for me, trying to make almost everything I performed seem like it was coming from somewhere outside of myself made everything feel sort of disjointed. Because I was removing myself from the equation as much as possible, there wasn’t any connective tissue between everything I was showing people.
These days I try to have the tricks I perform built off the central premise that I’m someone with an interest in learning about and performing magic. So to establish that premise, about 15% of the time, the tricks I perform are standard Magician-Centric effects and presentations.
Another 35% of the tricks I perform come across as somewhat Unfinished Magician-Centric effects. These are tricks I’m actually quite confident in performing, but I perform them in a way that suggests I’m still working on them. This is, primarily, the Peek-Backstage style I’ve written about in the past. Now I’m asking for their help as I work on a trick. So instead of saying, “Ta-dah! The coin has vanished.” I would say something like, “Okay, can you see the coin still? You can’t? Really? Are you messing with me? Oh, sweet. I didn’t think that would work.”
I find that asking people to play the role of “helper” or “a second set of eyes” while you “work on something,” takes a lot of the ego out of performing. And generally it’s a lot more comfortable in social situations for someone to “help” you with something than it is for them to sit and be entertained by you.
But this type of presentation (“Help me while I work on something”) really only makes sense if they’ve seen you perform tricks in a more traditional style. They understand what you’re building towards. You’re building towards being able to perform this trick in a manner similar to the “polished” tricks they’ve seen from you in the past.
The other 50% of my material is done in the Audience-Centric mode. They know of my interest in magic. They’ve seen me perform tricks and they’ve even helped me as I worked on tricks in their early stages. They’ve seen “behind the scenes,” and now they’re seeing even further behind the scenes. They’re taking part in a process that will allow them to briefly be able to read someone’s mind. They’re joining me as an audience member for a trick a third party does over text. They’re taking part in this odd ritual I discovered while reading some old magic books. They’re following these instructions that came with this unusual game I bought while digging through stuff at this weirdo’s garage sale.
The overarching “story” that I tell through my performances is that I had an initial interest in magic when I was young, and I just held onto that interest longer and took it further than most people do. I’ve pursued it far beyond the magic section of the library and tutorial videos on youtube. And that has led to meeting some really odd people, and discovering arcane information in old books, and learning psychological principles that aren’t widely known, and joining secret societies with weird rules, and getting my hands on strange objects that seem to do the impossible. All of these things can lead to “audience-centric” premises. But they really only make sense narratively if you know that I like to do the occasional magic trick.
So that’s my current proportion:
15% - Magician-Centric, 35% Unfinished Magician-Centric, 50% Audience-Centric.
Now, not every individual person who sees me perform sees things in that proportion, that’s just what I shoot for generally as an overall balance of effects.
This ratio allows me to tell the most believable story. That story being: I like to do tricks. Which requires learning and working on tricks. Which requires branching out into these other weird areas, because that’s how you learn the stuff that you can’t find online or at the bookstore.
I want to tell a “believable” story not because I want people to believe it, but because I like the idea of a cohesive narrative that ties everything together. Just as with any other art form, a storyline that makes sense allows people to more easily get wrapped up in the fiction. I said many years ago on this site that I try to see all the tricks I show people as part of one long performance. And I see this blend of performance modes as the overarching structure for that performance.
Without my interest in magic and without me performing the occasional standard trick for them, then all the Audience-Centric presentations would come down to, “Hey I found this weird book,” “Hey, I found this weird pendulum,” “Hey, I found this weird coin.” And it quickly becomes clear this is just a way to present different magic tricks, because no one just finds all that weird stuff.
But by having these various different modes of performance, I can have each one lend credence to the others, while also deepening the mystery of everything I do. If I never took credit for anything, then they would become accustomed to me not taking credit and that becomes just the “standard” way I do magic tricks. But, if I sometimes show people a magic trick in the traditional Magician-Centric style, then that suggests that the other times—when I’m claiming it’s something outside of myself that is responsible for what we’re witnessing—that maybe there actually is something more going on there.
