Don't you wanna elevate your magic to the next level? According to Rich Ferguson, a rather recent addition to the drone army that supports Ellusionist, mentalism is the way.
Magic is fine the way it is. If you have a good, solid close up base and a nice stage act you don't need the next level. What is the next level anyhow?
Are there levels in magic? Sure: Layman, Beginner, Extreme Beginner, Professional and IBM-Member I guess. But once you are a professional is there a need to progress into the realm of the mentalism? I think not. When I am booked, they book me, because I do magic. Not because I do mentalism. If they want a mentalist, they would hire a mentalist. The client wants me to do magic. And I love doing that. Making a coin vanish is a great thing. Magicians seems to be too close to that issue and dismiss a simple coin vanish as a beginner's trick. It is not. The same way mentalism is not the natural progression of magic.
Sure Mentalism can be a nice way to entertain a crowd, but it is not the next step in magic. It is a distant cousin of magic.
According to Rich Ferguson you can enhance your magic with the principles of mentalism. Really? I thought the mentalist's use the principles of magic. But I might be mistaken on that, not having researched mentalism along side magic... wait, I have.
Rich Ferguson also claims that putting magic and mentalism together "it's the best of both worlds". I think the best of both worlds is that they are not perceived as the same and that they stay apart from each other as much as they can.
Magic is a pure little world full of vanishes, transpositions, levitation, and restorations. Mentalism is a world full of predictions, suggestions, chances and talking with spirits. If you mix both, you get something that is hard to grasp and you need one hell of a character to make clear for the audience what is going on.
And I might add my own little observation here: Most performers lack the ability to support such a character. Especially the majority of the Ellusionist customer base.
You wanna know the next level of magic? A really deceptive false transfer with no funny moves and no awkward dancing of the hands. If you are able to do that you can do almost anything...even mentalism.
as usual .... SPOT ON
ReplyDeleteExcept you left out the level of magic I've attained, the "I don't care about 99.827434957% of what passes for or is called magic ..... unless it was written by Sam Sharpe and if you don't know who Sam Shapre was I really can't speak to you about magic because you won't understand and I'll be wasting time and breath both of which I am far too short of" level
the american Sam Sharpe was great too.
ReplyDeleteI can live without another "easy to mangle" series aimed and making little willies look like smaller willies with snazzy magic, and a pushy used car sales job.
Nobody that is actually any good at magic got that way because a huckster ladled this crap down their throats.