Do Not Just Take A Walk On The Wild Side
By Shane

My last article, Swimming In Sand, drew quite a few comments that were all very much alike. I knew going into it that describing what I was feeling, and what I believe magic's next step in its evolution is, would be a difficult thing to do. In fact, I even said it in the article. Hey, I might not know much, but I know when I'm about to attempt the literary equivalent of landing on the moon -- it sounds simple enough, but just getting off the launchpad can be a miracle.

Most of the comments I received were along the lines of two simple questions and a statement, most often expressed in a single line: "What are you? An idiot? Magic is all about self-expression! I express myself every time I perform any routine!" My answer: I thought a lot, wondered a lot, hypothesized a lot, and came up with an equally clever retort:

"Phooey."

A lot of performers -- not just magicians, mind you, but we'll stick to the ground we're used to traipsing on -- understand self-expression during the creative process, at the moment of the microcosmic Big Bang when an effect is created or made to fit their individual style and substance. We all know that, as soon as we decide to use a cross-cut force instead of a classic force or a Bobo vanish instead of a french drop, we are exercising self-expression. We are imprinting our experiences, tastes, thoughts, feelings, everything that makes us individuals, into that routine. The moment we take Color Monte and make it out of regular playing cards, we're expressing ourselves. A split-second after we finish a presentation that makes a card box a coffin in some long lost masoleum we're expressing ourselves.

There's no arguing that, and I don't intend to argue against something I firmly believe from the tip of my considerably long hair down to the bottom of my considerably big tootsies.

What I contend is that this is the self-expression of creation, and that's only half of the whole cloth. If magic is a performing art, then the creation is only the beginning of the labor; the actual performance is the ending of the handiwork, the final brushstroke that completes the painting. It's the self-expression during performance I see lacking in so many performers.

Forget the obvious connections to jazz music. Drop the analogous apron-strings to dance. Think in terms of expressing yourself as you perform, not just as you create.

I know, gentle reader. I hear you loudly and clearly: you express yourself by performing those individualized creations. And to a certain extent you're absolutely right to nail me down and say you're expressing yourself.

But how are you putting those wonderful creations to work? Chances are, you're doing like I did. "A" leads to "B" which goes smoothly to "C". Sometimes we even allow ourselves the luxury of the option of going to either "D" or "D-prime" from there. It's all tidy, and built well to a suitable climax, and it's the way we were taught, dammit, so that's the way it should be done. Going from "A" to "D" then to "C" and finishing with "B" is just not done.

Because we haven't tried.

We're skilled in our craft. We know the sleights. We know the effects. We have the psychological nuances of audience control down as pat as our Zarrow and as natural as our clink-pass. We've got our arsenal of tools and devices and hand-movements and mental gymnastics and we're quite prepared to use them. And we use them all the time while we create our stunning effects and routines. But we stop there. When we perform, we perform those routines by rote, as we created them, with the flow and the ebb we designed into them.

Ever do a matrix routine for an audience? Ever get hit with the idea of doing something else with one of those coins other than lifting the card to show -- poof! -- it's gone? During an ambitious card routine, did you ever feel a twinge of tearing that card into pieces and restoring it, or doing something else entirely with it?

What did you do with those flashes that come to you when you're performing? I can answer that with a reasonable feeling of accuracy: you went back home, tried it during a practice session, and either ditched it because you didn't like it or worked it into the routine because you did.

Ever feel those twinges and do it, right then and there, in front of an audience? On the spur of the moment, with no practice other than with all those tools you brought with you when you stood up in front of a spectator and said, "Watch me"? Again, with a reasonable sense of accuracy, I can say you haven't.

The reason I've got the feeling I'm right is because I never did. At all. Coins disappeared from under cards like I knew they were supposed to because I rehearsed it that way. Cards rose to the top of the deck intact because they were supposed to as I had planned them to. I expressed myself, surely, through those routines.

But I huddled back into my little corner of the world, thumb in my mouth and security blanket held securely to my head as Linus the Magus expressed myself by ignoring my impulses to express myself.

One day, I stopped ignoring the impulses. I pulled my thumb out of my mouth, traded in the old security blanket for a few moments of flop-sweat, and took a walk on the wild side for a change.

That's the self-expression I'm advocating. Not the comfortable one that comes from creating; the risky, scary, nerve-wracking, invigorating, energizing one that happens in front of an audience, live and in color. The emotion-charged expression of Self with a capital-S which can be so powerful we get entrenched in it ourselves and drag the audience with us.

If you've read my palpitating prose before, you know I've often said that an audience will pick up on your emotional energy, feed off it, and return it to you. That's a given, and I wasn't the first to make that observation -- I have a feeling that, in some papyrus hidden away in some jar in a museum exhibit somewhere are those very words. It's a truism of performance arts.

So what if we up the ante? What if we start flying by the seat of our pants once in a while? Will the audience know that something is up? Will they sense we're flying higher than the Wallenzas without the presence of a safety net? Yes, they will. Oh, not overtly, but we'll give them the little tell-tale signs and human psychology will fill in the rest. And they'll know, on a certain level, that they are seeing something new, exciting, and dynamic.

And they do, patient reader. Expressing ourselves at that critical time can have a great effect on the audience as well as ourselves. We feel astonishment ourselves, and that means they will too, to an even larger degree.

Self-expression during the performance, when everything is on the line, is a daring step. It's also the self-expression that matters the most at the end of the day. It's the icing on the cake that completes all the time and energy and effort you put forth into expressing yourself through the creation of those effects of yours.

Expressing ourselves during creation is taking a walk on the wild side. We're used to that at this level of the game.

Expressing ourselves during a performance is something else entirely; you're not just walking on the wild side.

You're strutting on the wild side. And you're in a whole new neighborhood.

Each and every time.

Shane