Creating Good Memories

Posted on September 28, 2010 by Aaron Jones

Making Memories

Part of the enjoyment of performing magic is creating great memories for my audience members and myself. Every show is different and the audience is different as well as the atmosphere. This is a great opportunity to use our magic to create great memories for everyone at the event. I also believe it is a part of our job when he are hired to perform for a group of people. It makes our magic more relevant and helps us to create better routines that make good memories for people. There has been a lot written by many magicians over the years on methods for making our making memorable but I believe we should always pursue this. Not just with effects but with the whole show experience. This goes beyond just the tricks themselves but to how we interact with the audience and create this feeling. It also means that sometimes we have to let audience members be the star as this is one of the best ways to do this. This is one of the things I have been thinking about recently and I am interested what you have to say about this. Please let me know!

Aaron

Magic Renaissance In My Head

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Aaron Jones

Street Festival Magic In Takamatsu

If you have been following my blog, and I am not really sure how many regular readers I have if any at all, you will have noticed I have have been blogging about magic basics, books etc. Well because I a have been going back and reading old books again and thinking in different ways about magic there seems to be a magic renaissance going on in my head. What do I mean by this? Well because I have been going back to basics recently many things I read and learned when I was younger have suddenly all started coming back to me. However they are not coming back to me in the form they did when I first learned them. They are coming back different and it has started my brain to think different about the magic I perform. It also has changed my magic taste as well. My performing style seems to be staying the same but my technique and the way I have worked out routining has changed a lot in the last little while. I have moved into having more engagement with my audiences as well have been working deeper to apply magic theories in terms of misdirection, timing, and audience management. It has also caused me to edit my performances and cut unnecessary performance parts, techniques and props. I am not sure where this is leading me but I see a new light and I am excited. It is like when I started magic for the first time again, but this time with the experience and knowledge and how to apply the knowledge. It is going to be a fun ride! Have you had a magic renaissance in your head?

Aaron

Going Back To The Basics

Posted on September 7, 2010 by Aaron Jones

Coins!

Recently I have started reading some of the old basic magic books I haven’t read since I was young again. These books are the basics of stage and close-up magic. After looking through these again I have started to re-read them in more detail relearning all the basics of magic once again. Going through these books again after years of doing magic, I feel I have a new perspective on what they teach. My attitude towards what I need to learn and improve on is much more mature now that 20 years ago. Even though I remember many of the techniques I read in these books and use many of them today, re-reading them has given me greater insight into how to make them even more effective and find points I missed when I read them the first time. For me the old has become new again. I find myself as I read them again thinking of new applications and the creative side of my brain is once again stimulated. I am glad that a few weeks ago that I started looking though these or I would not have started to read them once again. My goal over the next couple of months is to try to re-read as much as a can from the classic texts of magic and digest them and start to really apply them in new ways to my current routines and I am sure I will start to work out new and even better routines over the next year or so. So I suggest if you are starting to feel stale with your magic and are tired of many of the newer products, go back and re-read the classics. Your brain will start to awaken.

Aaron

Things I Enjoy About Performing Magic

Posted on August 23, 2010 by Aaron Jones

Enjoying Performing

I enjoy performing magic. That may be obvious but I think that to be a good magician you do really have to enjoy performing and I have talked about this before on my blog and on my AudioBoo. However today I want to talk about some of the things I enjoy about performing magic.

The first thing I really enjoy about performing is the people. If there were no people to watch my magic I would not be a performer. I enjoy people and how I can enjoy time with them having fun doing magic. I enjoy when they smile and laugh and the things they do. When they enjoy what I am doing I enjoy it even better. When they have fun watching and interacting with my show I know that I am being entertaining and I am happy that they can enjoy and escape things during my performance. The people become a big part of my show and I enjoy the interactions I have with them.

Another aspect of performing that I think is the intellectual challenge of putting together the show itself. Working out how effects fit together and how they fit me and the feeling I want to create during my show is a great challenge. Finding good effects that the audience will enjoy and working on ways to maximize magic theory, performance and fun together is enjoyable for me. Basically building a good show that the people will enjoy is very satisfying.

I also enjoy visiting the many places I get to perform at and enjoy performing in a variety of places. Sometimes certain venues can be challenging to perform at and once it again it brings that intellectual challenge to me that I enjoy. Once again meeting various people at different places is always fun.

These are just a few of the many reasons why I enjoy performing but the main one is common through all reasons and that is the first reasons I mentioned the people. The main reason is that I get to perform great people at many various places and that is what it is all about for me. What do you enjoy about performing magic?

Aaron

Magic AudioBoo Pushing Your Magic

Posted on August 15, 2010 by Aaron Jones

Today magic Audioboo is about pushing your magic and being honest with yourself.

Spice It Up!

Posted on August 14, 2010 by Aaron Jones

Spicy Magic

Recently when I have been working on my magic I have wanted to “spice” up my routines. I seem to come up with some neat ideas, however the problem is that the idea may seem cool to me, or maybe to other magicians but logically in the routine for a real audience it makes no sense. As well, trying to work on the patter so that the patter can justify the new element sometimes comes off as too contrived like a bad movie.

So as I work to add that spicy sauce to my magic routines I have to balance the spice with the overall feel and get the right flavor that tastes well. This takes a lot of time and experimentation and testing. What I do is I make the changes to a routine to spice it up and rehearse it. I try to record and video myself doing it. Then I leave it for a while and comeback and watch myself do it. If I feel it is ok then I start to test it with real people both magicians and non-magicians to get feedback. Then go back, or try testing it in a real show to see how the changes go.

My advice is if you want to make changes to a current routine to add spice take your time and make sure everything makes sense and test it out. Add some spice to your routines can greatly improve them if you do it right or be very bad if you don’t prepare well. Any ways back to trying to spice up a routine!

Aaron

Sharing Your Experiences With Magic

Posted on July 29, 2010 by Aaron Jones

Kinkaku-Ji in Kyoto

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.

Aaron

More On Doing My Show In Japanese

Posted on July 3, 2010 by Aaron Jones

Japanese Flag

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.

Aaron

Trying Mentalism In Japanese

Posted on June 26, 2010 by Aaron Jones

Mental Magic

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!

Aaron

Tired Myself Out Having Magic Fun

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Aaron Jones

Magic For People!

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.

Aaron