38 years of Magic and Bullshit

Penn & Teller - Young and handsome.

Here at the Illuminated Showman we follow the exploits and thoughts of the dynamic duo Penn & Teller with great interest. For not only are these fine magicians great Showmen but also, at least one of them... is a great magic thinker. Teller has as refreshingly a thought on what the art of magic is as the tricks are which he dreams up. In this interview moderated by Matt Donnely the two Showmen shine in their respective ways.

"Magic can be an intellectual artform because it has a built in irony. The idea of magic is that there is trickery there. The process happening inside spectators is an unwilling suspension of disbelief."

I find this very interesting. Rather than the approach which Penn describes as the style of Doug Henning: This is a dream I had... and then they mutilate some girls. This approach of just come with me on this journey, suspend your disbelief and let yourself slip back into a state of wonder and childlikeness, is just not enough, they claim. Do magicians perhaps use this ruse as a get out of jail free card for not creating effects that connect with Crowds deeply enough for it to matter to them? Or is is a denial of what Teller described as the unwilling suspension of disbelief? The dynamic duo certainly seems to favour the latter. 
An style which does not deal with the fact that people expect trickery when watching a magician is simply delusional. Teller further thinks that this is one of magics greatest qualities that it deals with what truth is. Questioning truth and reality is a cornerstone of rational thinking and with it deeply important for all. If one treat magic in this way, which any one who have acctually seen Penn & Tellers work will know that they utilize this philosophy in all that they do, and with great results. Their magic is fresh and honest. You cant help but feel that even though they are constantly fooling you they are not treating you as an idiot. They believe their audience to be made up of thinking individuals. With these key concepts, laid out so well in this interview, one gets a powerful philosophic tool to apply to ones conjuring. With this simple idea you can make your magic both fundamentally interesting and promote questioning rational thinking.

"Watching magic you are always looking with your eyes whilst measuring it against what you know."

 Teller

Steve Martin on the Power of tricks.

Teller believes that it is the way magic tricks stimulate the thinking process by showing seemingly impossible things whilst the spectators also knows that this is impossible is fundamental to the appeal of magic. He paraphrases Steve Martin:

Steve Martin magic is the lowest art form, something you can do if you have no talent elsewhere.

Teller

“I had loved magic tricks from the time I was six or seven. I bought books on magic. I did magic acts for my parents and their friends. I was aiming for show business from early days, and magic was the poor man's way of getting in: you buy a trick for $2, and you've got an act.”

STEVE MARTIN, Time Magazine, Aug. 24, 1987

"Anyone can do the crappiest magic trick and it still be interesting or have some sort of intellectual component... People get work doing terrible tricks with horrible narratives. "

Teller

If you have mastered tricks, be they magic or circus style skills like juggling or balancing or sideshow style tricks such as the human blockhead or swordswallowing you have an act even if you have no presentation. In many shows this would be all the performer had and the Management would hire a talker which could present the person with the tricky skills. But the point is tricks sell. 
When walking down a midway if you here that a man will be swallowing a fragile neon glass tube you don't ask who it is that will do it. If you hear a girl will get stark naked inside this tent you don't need to know who you just want to know how much the ticket is. This is the nature of tricks.

Here he is of course talking of what we here at the Illuminated Showman have written about as the Power of Tricks. The tricks in themselves has a power which truly captivates us. Even when done without narratives, as pure demonstrations of some new found skill, like finding a selected card, have some fascination for us. Thus we can buy a two dollar trick and with no skills of Showmanship go forth and if nothing else gain some attention and notoriety. 

Nate Staniforth - Magician

Last night as I couldn't sleep I remembered I had been pointed towards a link to a clip about Magician Nate Staniforth by Brian Daly. SO I checked it out. And it was really great. His straight forward and articulate style captured me. He pulls no punches. He does not soften his magic by making silly jokes. Unapolagettically he sells mystery.

Then I watched this. It is the teaser trailer for a web series Nate is doing.

And finally here is a 15min talk he gave in 2011 for Tedx in Iowa. For some reason I cant link to it but you can click this link here.

"What is it about magic and magicians that draws us in? What makes us suspend and challenge our perception of reality? In this TEDx Talk Magician Nate Staniforth shares his passion for using illusion to create a feeling of astonishment and amazement, and how vital this emotion is to the human condition."

The Way of the Showman - Episode 1

phophotos © LOUISE CHIN e IGNACIO ARONOVICH

In 1998 I found myself thrown into a crazy world of street performers, freaks, homeless people, angry locals, all night parties, and general mind altering experiences. Travelling with to brilliant, vibrant, and inspiring fellows from Australia with a freshly broken heart I watched the world explode in every direction.
I played streetshows at the Edinburgh Fringe and this was before anyone controlled what we did. So it was a little more chaotic, to put it mildly. Amongst all the crazy people handing out flyers me and my
fellow travellers the Space Cowboy and Shep Huntly were invited to see a Freakshow which performed as part of the festival. The show was called the Kamikaze Freakshow and was run by the crazy power engine and freakshow fanatic John Kamikaze. I was blown away by the shows great fusion of theatrics and hardcore sideshow stunts. John did an unprotected neon swallow, sat for an hour pre show "pinning up" as he called it, putting 350 hatpins and hyperdermic needles through his flesh. This was just his costume.

pic: LOUISE CHIN e IGNACIO ARONOVICH

I had dabbled in some human pincushioning and had put three pins through myself. This was dedication on a whole other level. So when we were all partying and dancing in the wee hours of the night and I was sporting some of my flexi stuff on the dance floor and suitably affected Kamikaze, whom we had met and come to fear and love, asked me to join his family, and carried away by the moment I said yes.
Next day he came up onto the High Street, the Royal Mile and saw my show. He was still interested in adopting me. I had been whisked away from a messy break up by Shep Huntly and the Space Cowboy only weeks before and from my brokenhearted haze the world was offering up opportunities faster than I could contemplate them. So I had decided to just say yes to whatever life threw at me.

I had previously had a love of the Sideshow. I had experienced the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow and marvelled at the Enigma, Mr Lifto and Mat the Tube. I also had befriended Håvve, the Head of Pain Sollution, an awesome fakir/sideshow outfit from Oslo Norway, but I had never seen anything like the Kamikaze's.

photos © LOUISE CHIN e IGNACIO ARONOVICH

Before long the Freakshow had run away with me and I found myself sleeping literally on the floor in John Kamikaze's little house in Pilton, Edinburgh. Sharing the house with Pinky Pinky, (Baby Dee)-  a hermaphrodite which had been performing with every sideshow and freak establishment in the States, Danny Powertool - a dwarf penile phenomenon lifting unimaginably heavy weights with his privates, and Chris Tanner a musician from Melbourne part of the Freak band. It was a crazy time. Crazy shows.
I read Geek Love at the time, and my strange headspace and living space made the book loose some of its impact. The twisted characters of the book blended in so naturally with my real life new family that it wasnt until a few years later, when I reread the most awesome Freakshow novel of all time that I discovered just how twisted it really was. Those who know that book  will appreciate how strange my life was at the time...

The Adventures of CF Melbourne Comedy festival - 06

This first real episode of The Way of the Showman web series shows some scenes from that crazy time of my life. 1998 seems like a very long time ago. I seem like another person, yet still so much the same. Same block of marble but so much less finished. Life keeps chipping away at me and it still very much is.
The episode also shows bits of my first full solo show called the Adventures of Captain Frodo from 2006, already 7 years ago... wowsa. Time flies and it is great to have Hamish McCormick digging through the extensive archives of Carnival Cinema to dig up and create these gems from the past.

I hope you enjoy episode 1.

The Way of the Showman Web series -Teaser

After a freak, sneak, peek into the Carnival archives only a few days ago with the fine collaboration

twixt Carnival Cinema, C. W. Stoneking and yours truly we get a teaser of what's to come. As always the editing and filming is done by my friend and faithful companion Hamish McCormick and I must say it is looking mighty fine!

The background for this web series is a ten year long, ever morphing dream shared by McCormick and myself. Every meeting, every skype chat, or long distance phone call (whilst I'm out on the road peddling my unique brand of Showmanship and he is holding the fort in Brunswick, Melbourne,) invariably ends in deep conversation about the details of the current state of the "project." It has been a merchandize DVD, an art film, a bio pic, a film, and an endless topic of creative conversation. What on earth do we do with all this great footage?
Now finally it is really coming together! 

Hamish has followed me, literally around the world, always with his faithful camera rig handy and documented my trials and tribulations. He was there when I fell off the cans. He was there when La Clique broke into the West End in London. He was there when for the first time I took a crew of artists back to Norway, to my hometown of Haugesund. He was there when I worked with Circus Oz, when I worked with the Happy Sideshow, La Soiree, at the Circus Festival in Tasmania, when I got my first home loan approved, when I did my first solo show, and on it goes.

Now over the next future we will share my life with you. It will be a video diary from my life on the road going back a decade and told in no particular order. It will be slices of life, my life, served up like pieces of fine layer cake.

Enjoy!

The Way of the Showman - a brand new Series

This fine piece of fusion art is created by Hamish McCormick the brain and power behind Carnival Cinema. Over the last 11 years this fine film maker has followed yours truly around with a video camera and pretty much captured way more than the highlights of my life and career. As an ongoing series he will produce videos spanning a decade and fitting all matters of styles and contents. I will be posting them here on the Illuminated Showman and they will also be appearing over at the Carnival Chronicles.

The film below has been filmed in several sessions over a few years and the track is by the extraordinary blues man and raconteur C.W. Stoneking.

I truly hope you like this first installment in the series in The Way of the Showman - the Life and Times of Captain Frodo.

C.W. Stoneking, Blues man and singing showman.

Commentary on Lesson 68 - Failure

"Character is created by encountering and overcoming failure."

After a comment from a fellow Craft man I thought I would divulge some deeper thoughts on failure and the importance of overcoming it. (Flanagan, this one is for you.)

Those who have seen my Tennis act will be aware of the emphasis I put on chaos and apparent failure and struggle. It is, or should at least be commonly known that making the audience believe you are in some kind of trouble raises their level of attention. If they really believe that the handstand artist had to awkwardly jump down to avoid coming crashing head first onto the stage the Crowd will be on the edge of their seats for his second seat. It will also make his second and successful attempt all the more triumphant. This is, as they say, an old circus trick.
On the other hand, if you appear to pretend to be failing but they can tell that it is nothing but

charades the whole exercise quickly becomes embarrassing. To both the Showman and the Crowd. A clown who pretends to be bad at what he does but fails to convince his crowd its real, fails doubly. He dies two deaths. Not only is he bad, he is bad at being bad. In this case two wrongs don't make a right.
Pretending to be bad at something needs the most amount of care and rehearsal. Chaos needs to be very carefully practiced and planned.
Most Novice Showmen which sees a more experienced Showman perform a great failure act such as the "bad clown" or the "bad magician" fail to grasp that do be a "bad clown" one actually have to be a good clown and a great Showman. It is not enough to be bad. If you act bad you will be bad and the amount of work available for bad showmen is not enough to get by on. So one has to be good, or perhaps indeed great, to be bad, that is: it is not easy to be bad.
It is often said that people love to see a magician screw up. This is not entirely true, if it is true at all. The only way a Crowd would want to see you actually fail was if you were an asshole. In
that case they would like to see you humiliated. But in any other case it is painful to watch someone die on stage. We are not talking about a Ricky Gervais kind of ironic fail or knowingly being bad, we are talking the magician which with his un-ironic attitude and self important behavior which then spectacularly blunders his tricks. If the Man is unlikable the Show will have to be of exceptional entertainment value, but such is rarely the case. 
Dariel Fitzkee sums up the reason for this in his brilliant exposition Showmanship for Magicians as: "People are more interested in people than in anything else." Darwin Ortiz writes in Strong Magic: "Character fascinates people, and character is revealed under pressure. Most of the time you can maintain a facade in dealing with the world. But, when things go wrong, that's when the real you emerges."

With this in mind the idea that people like watching Showmen in trouble gets a different meaning. No longer are we talking about genuine failure, but the overcoming of obstacles. They want to see you challenged, not to die miserably. (Of course there are master Showmen out there who no doubt can pull of acts where they genuinely fail and still are loved, but isn't perhaps even the likes of Neil Hamburger and Tony Clifton wins in one way or the other? Since they have transcended the fail.)
The bottom line is that Crowds wants to see how you deal with pressure and mounting challenges and the more they like you the more they want you to succeed and therefor the more they will be captivated by a situation that apparently is going awry. 
So the advice for the Novice Showman is to not rely on failure since you first need to have the Crowd with you before you can begin laying on the next layer of attention getting technique. Real emotion needs to be stirred in the Crowd, positivity towards you, to be specific before you should delve too deeply into failure.

For an audience to see you in trouble doesn't provide entertainment, it only creates the conditions for entertainment. It generates audience interest. The next question is how you get yourself our of trouble. If you do it by applying your magical skill (if you are a magician) - by doing something impossible - the audience will be pleased. And the more hopeless your situation seems, the more emotionally gratifying it is for the audience when you triumph.

Darwin Ortiz

Lessons from the Way of the Showman - 68

Character is created by encountering and overcoming failure.

 

Play

Pic by Rob Woodcox.

Showman is made up of two words; Show and Man. (So far I hope I have lost none of you.) Both are equally important aspects of attention for those who have chosen the Way of the Showman.
Often the individual Showmen lets one overshadow the other. As a young man, with little other to dig my fingers and mind into than Shows and the creation of acts, I found myself totally immersed in the Show aspects. Spending so much time pondering upon the finer details of timing applied to a particular physical slapstick gag, applying myself to mastering a push off double lift, or attempting to discover a synthesis of Albanian folk dance and utter ridiculousness. These days, as a first time father, the Man aspects have taken over. I have solo shows coming up in Norway soon so I am busy translating and creating a new stupid magic routine, but the majority of my brain power and time goes into my family.
Shep Huntly has been known to remind fellow performers to nurture a life beyond the Shows. Remember to have other hobbies, and this is very important. Even though it is hard to believe at times there is more to life than shows.

As I am drawn towards the Man side of the Way I have been thinking of play. The importance of

playing. The role of play in teaching us about the world. As the swedish clown without borders clown professor Nalleslavski says, the key to clowning is in Play and Connecting with the Crowd. That is it. Play, with the attention the Crowd gives you, get on stage, find the game, enjoy the game and play it.
Play is not just for children, but it is, if possible, even more important for them. Play is the child's work. This is a key insight. We work, if you can call creating and doing shows work, but at least it seems to fall into that category by being what you do to make a living even if your main purpose is to create a life.
Play is the child's work. They need it. They thrive in it. IF it is right.

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:s
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man.

William Wordsworth

The Child is the father of the Man and they both find meaning through their "work," the first in Play the second in finding a Way to Play at work.

The following is from an article in the Atlantic by Esther Entin, and the thoughts come from an article in the Journal of Play by Peter Gray.   

FIVE WAYS PLAY BENEFITS KIDS

When children are in charge of their own play, it provides a foundation for their future mental health as older children and adults. Gray mentions five main benefits:

1. Play gives children a chance to find and develop a connection to their own self-identified and self-guided interests.

As they choose the activities that make up free play, kids learn to direct themselves and pursue and elaborate on their interests in a way that can sustain them throughout life. Gray notes that: "...in school, children work for grades and praise and in adult-directed sports, they work for praise and trophies.... In free play, children do what they want to do, and the learning and psychological growth that results are byproducts, not conscious goals of the activity."

2. It is through play that children first learn how to make decisions, solve problems, exert self control, and follow rules.

As children direct their own free play and solve the problems that come up, they must exert control over themselves and must, at times, accept restrictions on their own behavior and follow the rules if they want to be accepted and successful in the game.

As children negotiate both their physical and social environments through play, they can gain a sense of mastery over their world, Gray contends. It is this aspect of play that offers enormous psychological benefits, helping to protect children from anxiety and depression.

"Children who do not have the opportunity to control their own actions, to make and follow through on their own decisions, to solve their own problems, and to learn how to follow rules in the course of play grow up feeling that they are not in control of their own lives and fate. They grow up feeling that they are dependent on luck and on the goodwill and whims of others...."

Anxiety and depression often occur when an individual feels a lack of control over his or her own life. "Those who believe that they master their own fate are much less likely to become anxious or depressed than those who believe that they are victims of circumstances beyond their control." Gray believes that the loss of playtime lessons about one's ability to exert control over some life circumstances set the scene for anxiety and depression.

3. Children learn to handle their emotions, including anger and fear, during play.

In free play, children put themselves into both physically and socially challenging situations and learn to control the emotions that arise from these stressors. They role play, swing, slide, and climb trees ... and "such activities are fun to the degree that they are moderately frightening ... nobody but the child himself or herself knows the right dose."

Gray suggests that the reduced ability to regulate emotions may be a key factor in the development of some anxiety disorders. "Individuals suffering from anxiety disorders describe losing emotional control as one of their greatest fears. They are afraid of their own fear, and therefore small degrees of fear generated by mildly threatening situations lead to high degrees of fear generated by the person's fear of losing control." Adults who did not have the opportunity to experience and cope with moderately challenging emotional situations during play are more at risk for feeling anxious and overwhelmed by emotion-provoking situations in adult life.

4. Play helps children make friends and learn to get along with each other as equals.

Social play is a natural means of making friends and learning to treat one another fairly. Since play is voluntary and playmates may abandon the game at any time if they feel uncomfortable, children learn to be aware of their playmates' needs and attempt to meet them in order to maintain the play.

Gray believes that "learning to get along and cooperate with others as equals may be the most crucial evolutionary function of human social play ... and that social play is nature's means of teaching young humans that they are not special. Even those who are more skilled at the game's actions ... must consider the needs and wishes of the others as equal to their own, or else the others will exclude them." Gray cites increasing social isolation as a potential precursor to psychopathology and notes that the decline in play may be "both a consequence and a cause of the increased social isolation and loneliness in the culture."

5. Most importantly, play is a source of happiness.

When children are asked about the activities that bring them happiness, they say they are happier when playing with friends than in any other situation. Perhaps you felt this way when remembering your own childhood play experiences at the beginning of this article.

Gray sees the loss of play time as a double whammy: we have not only taken away the joys of free play, we have replaced them with emotionally stressful activities. "[A]s a society, we have come to the conclusion that to protect children from danger and to educate them, we must deprive them of the very activity that makes them happiest and place them for ever more hours in settings where they are more or less continually directed and evaluated by adults, setting almost designed to produce anxiety and depression."

Let the kids out in to the world without plans, let them make their own plans, let them discover themselves through play and you will get great creative Showmen and ShowWomen.

Lessons from the Way of the showman - 67

A sign that you have become a Master Showman is: When nervousness no longer exist.
There is always a particular energy present before a show. The Novice calls this nervousness, the Master calls the same energy Inspiration.

Searching for Sugar Man - Never give up

For any artist who has ever had their dreams broken, who has not found an audience, who has given so much of their heart but not gotten any response:
Watch Searching for Sugar Man.

Don't ever give up hope. Somewhere out there you might be bigger than Elvis!

The Power of Stories

For those of you who don't already listen to Ira Glass's This American Life might not know the man talking in the film clip below. This American Life is a brilliant story telling show that is absolutely well worth checking out. In some ways the lecture Ira gives below gives the flavour of his radio show.
His topic is stories.

”Narrative,” he says, “is basically a machine that’s raising questions and answering them.”  

He talks about how to keep your listeners attention and how that then can get your point across with a story which grabs and keeps your attention.

Towards the end as he gives his thoughts on 1001 nights we get a glimpse of the true power of stories to change people and sometimes even save lives. This is inspirational and important stuff for Showmen in all genders and walks of life.

Derren Brown creates "religious experience..."

Derren Brown, Master Showman.

The fact that the new arch deacon of British atheism even contemplates the idea of creating  religious
experiences in people might seem contradictory or at best inflammatory to some people. But, as most faithful readers of this blog will know the leap is not such a strange one at all.

Here at the Illuminated Showman we believe the archetype of the Showman to have originated in the Shaman. The Shaman was a leader figure from a time so far back there was no separation between the societies' roles of priest and doctor. The shaman served as both of these. He, or she, was also, at heart, what we here on this blog  call Showmen, with a capital S. Someone who knows there is real power in the actions of Showmen. Real powers which can create real change in real people that will make positive contributions to the Crowds who experience them and hence in the world at large.

In light of this, the fact that Derren Brown uses the Craft of Showmanship to create a genuine religious experience in a devoted atheist, is not such an unlikely event. There is no doubt that Derren Brown is a Master Showman and that he wields his Craft in the most effortless and powerful way. To such an extent that in the beginning of his career even yours truly, found himself taken in by his expertly way of creating the illusion of giving away the Methods to his Effects. I too thought that surely this man is something other, perhaps something more, than a conjurer. With such fabulous confidence he presents his unique take on mentalism that it becomes almost unrecognisable as magic. His blend of psychological subtleties and magic and hypnotism is very fine indeed.

As I have written about, in detail, there is great power in lies. There is no particular bestowed upon things simply because they are true. (Unless you count the results created by science based medicine vs the medicine which is called alternative medicine. A medicine which would fall in under the domain of fellow craftsmen of Showmanship.) Truth has no added power because of its truthiness. Unless the person is a staunch rationalist which would be moved by "truth" in similar ways people might be moved or biased by god, crystal healing, or homeopathy.
Derren Brown is a Showman and he performs "tricks" but that does not make his powers any less real. The emotions of the woman which is "converted" in the video below is real. She has what would be described as a religious experience by any person leaning in that direction. Since she is not religious she has trouble classifying it. What do we atheists and Showmen of all denominations and sexes call this type of experience?

I have had such an experience. Entering the lobby of the Natural History Museum in New York City I was moved to tears by the enormous display of dinosaurs in the grand hall of science. A predator attacking a giant Brachiosaurus with a child and the mother rearing up in defense. It is a stunning depiction of the world of the Deep Past.
To me the well of emotion, the deep connection, the perspective - rendering me feeling as unique yet insignificant as a snowflake - was so powerful and so real it made me cry. There is no doubt, if I was a believer I would call it a religious experience. A deeply felt experience of god's creation. But since I am not a believer it was instead a real experience of the real world.

It is a great show and I hope you enjoy it.

You find what you are at the Carnival

"The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick."

Charles Darwin

It is circular it is circus

Crowds are our clay. 

We mold minds and souls.

But what we do,

what we shape

is little but the dreams of crowds

made real

it is flesh, it is blood, it is piss and cum.

It is circular

it is a circus

Crowds also shape Showmen

and the Carnival itself

is the sum 

of human desires.

The way the peahen shaped

the peacocks tail

crowds shaped the carnival

Some

want to know the future

Some seeks speed and thrills

Some wants seduction

others sex 

Some wants terrors and horror

but still stay safe

Some wants to fight

others to watch. 

Some wants delicious fat fried food,

sugary drinks and doughnuts. 

We all want crowds of people 

on grounds where different rules apply

grounds where the playing fields are leveled.

Where anything and anyone is fair game

A fair-ground.

We want the new,

the strange,

the exotic and extraordinary 

but we want it behind strong perimeter fences 

and gone tomorrow -

taking the escapades and transgressions of the night

away with it. 

Leaving nothing behind but

dead grass 

trampled popcorn 

and memories

fading like the carnival posters.