Magic like all art forms is about sharing feelings, and experience. However, I see very few magicians sharing their experiences through magic. I have seen many that use canned experiences to fit a certain effect but I am talking about sharing real experiences you have had. You often see comedians telling funny stories about themselves, and as well hears songs whose writers write about their experiences. I believe that magic is the perfect medium to share your real life experiences because you can create the same feeling you had with your experience in the audience by the effect you perform that relates to your experience. Not only does this give your magic meaning it makes the magic truly yours. I try when I can to do this with my own magic. Here in Japan I try to talk about my life in Canada, as well as what it is like for me to live in Japan as a Canadian. I use my magic to relate to my audiences my experiences living in Japan both good and bad and how I over came them. This is a great way to come up with routines. So the next time you are stuck working on a new effect or routine try to draw form you own life experiences, you may just find the creative pool you were looking for.
These days there are tons of new magic products on the market and new ones released everyday. Myself I find very few of them anything I would buy or use. However, sometimes there comes a product that is brilliant that is something that I would use in my show. This is what I thought when I saw Chad Long’s new effect Flash. Flash is colour changing USB flash drives. The effect is based on the old colour knives effect. The problem with the colour changing knives trick is that it is uncommon that we would carry knives these days. What Chad Long did was brilliant, instead of two different colour knives, he came up with using two different colour USB flash drives, which are something modern and are objects that we might carry with us. I was sold.
I ordered the effect from Char Long’s website and was delivered to me here in Japan in 8 days which is great service. The props are well made, better than I thought they would be. Basically you don’t have to worry about the USB flash drives breaking as they are made from rubber. They are also easy to clean. There is a nice carry case to keep the flash drives together when not performing so that you don’t lose them. Note that these are not working USB Flash Drives, they are made just for this effect with no memory inside. They come with instructions that teaches the basic moves and a nice routine. The nice this about this product is that it is the colour changing knives as flash drives so you can use many of the moves and routines for the knives with these flash drives. This gives you a big pond to create your own routine.
This is a product that I recommend and that I will be using all the time. Below is a video of Chad Long performing it and it can be purchased from Chad Long’s website here for $30.00 US.
The Essential Magic Conference, the first digital magic conference, was held from July 15 to the 17 2010. When I first saw this advertised I knew I had to be apart of this event and I signed up right away. I was not wrong this was a wonderful event. Over those 3 days I had almost no sleep. The live event was held from 12am Japan time until about 7:30am because of the time zone. The event was organized by Luis de Matos, Marco Tempest and David Britland. They did a brilliant job bringing a big and new project like this to life. It had 33 speakers and they all where at the Studio in Portugal, and the participants watched live from the Internet. Participants also get 1 year access to the website which will have all the sessions as on demand viewing after the event and as well receive the event on DVD. The cost for this event was about 75$US which was well worth it. Below the break I will talk about what I enjoyed about the conference.
This weekend I will probably get almost no sleep! Lucky it is a long weekend here in Japan. Why is this? well, with the Essential Magic Conference and Shikoku Magic Friends activities in Takamatsu I will be doing magic all day and all night. Most of the Essential Magic Conference live broadcasts start after 12:00AM Japan time so that means no sleep. Then driving to Takamatsu on Saturday coming home at around 12:00AM then online for the conference. Going to be a great time and hopefully it will motivate me even more. Today is just a short blog so below enjoy a video of Lance Burton from the Essential Magic Conference site.
Aaron
I have written about performing in Japanese and in other languages before in my blog, but today I wanted to write a little more on the subject and this is, it is not just enough for me just to translate or write my show in Japanese but I have to take care to incorporate cultural aspects of the culture into the show. This goes for pop culture, political culture, history, and much more. The reason that this is important is that here in Japan my audience is 99.99% Japanese people. In many of the causes many of the people in a show may or may not know each other depending on the venue. In those cases it is my job to be able to connect the people in one way, with a shared common experience. This I can achieve by making some joke, or commenting on some shared Japanese cultural experience they all have and that I have. I do this by making a comment at the beginning of my show or by making a joke in my introduction. This then right off the starts makes the audience connect psychologically by connecting them to this mentioned shared cultural experience. This really breaks the ice between the audience members so that they are now “primed” to react better to my performance. It also benefits my relationship to them. One it brings me into their shared experience as well. This is very important for me in Japan as a non-Japanese performer. They seem to one find it interesting I know and understand some cultural Japanese experience that they thought that I would not possible have had. This breaks the ice between me and the audience and creates the bond of the shared experience between us. They become more relaxed with me and they start to talking to me like I am Japanese rather than a foreigner, which can be a problem for foreigners living in Japan. This technique I use for my show I also do in my real life in Japan and it has the same effect. So remember if you are performing a show in a different language in a different country make sure you add this shared cultural experience into the show it will go a long way.
You may have seen the video below as it went viral a few weeks back when the iPad launched here in Japan. It is magician Shinya Uchida. After this video went viral he has appeared on numerous TV programs here in Japan. Today he appeared on one that was a live broadcast. Of course he went there to perform magic with the iPad. He did a few of the effects in the video below but he had a number of new interactive effects that interacted with real world objects and the iPad with audience participation. Great creativity and I hope to see more of him in the near future. Below is the video that went viral with English subtitles. Enjoy!
I enjoy good mentalism, and over the years have always tried to incorporate some kind of mentalism into my show. After moving to Japan in 2003, however I have had trouble integrating good mentalism into Japanese. Visual mentalism has been no problem or very simple effects, but trying to perform more sophisticated mental effects in Japanese had been difficult for me. The main reason being of course language. I can speak Japanese but many mentalism effects rely on having good language skills to be able to full control a situation. Recently I have really wanted to get back into performing mentalism again and this time in Japanese. So one way I thought to help was to learn some new mentalism effects in Japanese for the Japanese language. So I picked a book by Ichiro Araki called Mental Magic: Technical Mental magic. I will spend some time over the next few weeks learning some of the effects from this books and concentrating on the language used in Japanese to present them. My hope is that I will be able to create a simple language base where then can adapt some of my old mental magic effects to work better in Japanese and as well learn some new ones. This should be fun!
Only June 18th and 19th I was performing at Terushita’s Magic Bar Intiki Magician. Terushita went to Malaysia for a magic convention and some us other Shikoku Magicians took over his bar while he was gone. During the past 3 years I have not had a chance to work a full evening at a magic bar, I have done a few short spots, but not all evening like I used to do 3 times a week when I worked at the old magic bar Momentos. On Friday, June 18, I worked with my good friend Mame Jiro and a University Student Magician Shohei. Another University Student Magician Masashi came at the start of the night but had to leave and came back to help us close up. It was a great and busy night. The picture in this blog is from that night. We were so busy we were not able to take many photos at all. We opened at 7:00PM and finally left the magic bar close to 2:00AM
On Saturday June 19 we “held” the meeting of the Shikoku Magic Friends Club. We were so busy we could not actually hold a meeting. Again we were packed and a lot of people came after the Japan vrs Netherlands World Cup game. Japan lost so people came to watch magic! We had great people all all night. Magicians that performed that night were and I hope I don’t forget anyone, Mame Jiro, Shohei, Shinnotsuke, Kiniku Kun, Jack Amano, Uru, Masashi, and myself. It was good we were all there because it was that packed that we were all kept busy. Shinnotsuke and I left to head back to Ehime at 2:30AM and the last customers were still there. Thanks to Jack and Uru for closing up that night.
It was great to get back to working all night at a magic bar, I have really missed it. Recently I have only been working private events for a shorter set time, but getting behind that bar and enjoying the people like they are enjoying the magic was really good and very motivating. Going to have to do this again very soon. I want to thank Mame Jiro for letting me crash at his place Friday night.
THIS WEEK IN MAGIC :: LARRY CLARK http://bit.ly/c3aPwn from @thewizard 10 hours ago
It's Friday here time to reflect on what I did during the week. ???????????????????? 20 hours ago
RT @LeeAsherMagic: The magic #EMConference was worth every penny....& receiving a 30 day trial membership to #AskAlexander makes it even ... 20 hours ago
Thanks to @wkalush and the @EMConference for the fee 30 day membership to CARC. Love it! http://bit.ly/apLi7X2010/07/29
