Category Archives: Productivity

Productivity

Things I Enjoy About Performing Magic

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Enjoying Performing

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

Spice It Up!

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Spicy Magic

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

The Conjuring Arts Research Center & Ask Alexander

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Ask Alexander

Ask Alexander

Sometimes there are services and products that you didn’t think you needed but once you tried you now can’t live without. This happened with me for Twitter. Now I don’t know what I would do without Twitter but before I used Twitter I never really thought much about it. Well askalexander.org is like that for me now. Those of us who registered with the Essential Magic Conference all received a free month preview of Ask Alexander. Can I saw wow! Ask Alexander is run by the Conjuring Arts Research Center whose Executive Director is Bill Kalush. What is the Conjuring Arts Research Center you may ask well here is a quote from their site:

“The Conjuring Arts Research Center is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of magic and its allied arts, which include psychic phenomenon, hypnosis, deceptive gambling, mentalism, ventriloquism, juggling, and sleight of hand techniques.”

Ask Alexander one of the services that they run is a search database of magic books, magazines, and newsletters. I can say it is fantastic. After my preview month I will continue with the service. You can save publications in the database in a personal bookshelf as well when you research on a topic you can keep them in collections and download them as one PDF or have it emailed to you. Very useful. It even works well on my iPhone. If you are a magic creator, lecturer, magic consultant, magic historian, or just love magic you should have a look. It is not free and there is a yearly membership price and a few levels of membership depending on what your needs are. You can see those listed here. It is well worth it, and like I mentioned I will be continue with a membership after my preview.

In the picture you can see one of the searches I did. You can see my vanity as I searched myself . It turned out to be cool because I found a bunch of Ring Reports I did for the Victoria Magic Circle in the Linking Ring in the late 1990′s that I forgot about and and other places where I was mentioned and this brought back a lot of memories I had forgotten about.

I want to thank Bill Kalush and the staff of the Conjuring Arts Research Center for giving us at the EMC the free month preview.

Aaron

Sharing Your Experiences With Magic

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Kinkaku-Ji

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

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Japanese Flag

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

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Mental Magic

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


What Was That Effect Again?

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It has been a while since I have had any time to blog. I have been busy working on some projects which has kept my brain busy so I have not had a chance to blog or AudioBoo. However this week I should be back at it at a regular pace! Anyways What I wanted to talk about today is making you magic understandable to the audience.

Over the past few weeks I have had the chance to see a few magic performers perform live and watch some magic on the Internet. I saw some great magic and great technique. But one bad thing I saw a few times was some magic that was a bit confusing. What I mean the effect was not clear. Even I did not understand what the trick was supposed to be, so I figure a non-magician would also not understand what the effect was. One video I was asked to watch, I watched it over five times but I failed to see what the effect was. The flourishes were great but I did not see any magic and I was supposed to be a routine. Some of the live ones I saw again, I saw great technique but the effects were so long and complicated that sometimes after the magician had o explain what had just happened. It was not clear to the audience, which I think makes them feel very uncomfortable on a few levels. I think that when an audience member sees and effect and they don’t understand what happened they feel that maybe it is their fault, and that other people do understand when in fact they don’t. This makes it hard for the audience to react to the magic and the applause and feedback from them comes back all staticy. The last thing you want to do is make your audience feel awkward. So when you work on routines check them and make sure the effect, and the motivation for the effect is crystal clear. This will improve your show and improve the experience for your audience as well.
Aaron

Introducing Inspire Magic

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Inspire Magic

Inspire Magic

I would like to introduce the reworking of my parent company Aaron Jones Entertainment. I have changed the name to Inspire Magic to work better with my magic activities here in Japan and on the Internet. This web aaronjones.com site will stay the same and I will continue blogging as I normally do and update information on my shows etc. Inspire Magic will allow me to branch to other avenues of live magic performance as well as Internet magic content not to do with just my shows and activities. I will be updating the site with more content over the next while and I will have the Japanese sections up in the new week or so. There will be a section for Magicians and lots of other content for non-magicians. If you have some time have a look.

Aaron