Yes, that’s correct. As you said you’re in the “perfect position.” You have no past baggage to bring into these interactions. If you were, like, embarrassingly trying to pass yourself off as a gambling expert for 6 months when you were 15, nobody here has to know.
Before I answer your question, I want to talk about a related subject. It’s something I think that is important to consider when being introduced to a new social circle. A new job. A new school. Moving to a new area. Or whatever the case may be where you’re being introduced to a potential new audience.
As you meet this new audience consider what your end goal is regarding how people will view you and the magic you show them. There are few answers that pop out to me.
Goal #1 - You just want to show people tricks. And you don’t really care how they perceive your performance (other than that you hope they enjoy it).
This is easy. If this is your goal, the tricks and presentations you choose will be the ones you enjoy performing the best. That may overlap with tricks audiences like the best too, but not necessarily. (We’ve all seen performers who love practicing and performing tricks that audiences are indifferent about.)
Goal #2 - You want them to genuinely believe something that isn’t true. You want them to believe you have some real powers of magic, or gambling skill, or psychological manipulation, or reading body language, or whatever other ability or combination of abilities you want them to believe.
If that’s your goal, it’s simple enough to downplay magic as a hobby (or never mention it at all) when you meet new people.
If this is your goal, the tricks and presentations you choose will be those that support the belief you’re trying to establish.
The audience-centric end goal is more like this:
Goal #3 - You want to show people magic, but you want them to relate to these types of interaction in new ways. Their perception of the experience is paramount.
If this is your goal, you won’t be choosing material solely based on how much you like it, or how much it’s in line with a power you want to claim. If this is your goal, you’re going to be choosing material based on how easily you can use it to create different, memorable experiences for the people you perform for.
This is more of an amateur’s goal than a professionals, typically, because it presumes the same people seeing multiple tricks over time.
The key to this goal when you first meet people is to get them to drop their guard and any preconceptions of magic as puzzle, a challenge, or a validation-seeking exercise.
But you can’t really get people to drop those preconceived notions unless you tell them that you’re into “something different” than traditional magic. That’s the key. To be open to something different they have to know to expect something different..
I’ve hit people with intensely strong magic soon after meeting them. And they often recognize that what I did was on a much higher level than what they have seen before. But if I haven’t laid some groundwork that the sort of stuff I do is of a different nature than magic they’ve seen in the past, then they still tend to approach the experience the way they would previous tricks: looking for the secret or putting up their guard in a way that undermines the experience because they don’t want to look or feel foolish.
But if I tell people—“Yeah, I had an interest in magic as a kid. But I don’t really do those types of tricks anymore. I’m into something that’s kind of different now.”—now they will start doing the work of differentiating what I’m doing from the magic they’ve seen in the past.
Similarly, if someone said to you, “Yeah, I grew up learning ballet. But I’ve taken that interest in a new direction and doing some unusual things with it.” You would be expecting something “new” when they eventually danced for you. And you would be attuned to the “newness” even if what they showed you was firmly rooted in ballet.
To get people to engage with your tricks in new ways, the tricks can’t just be better than what they’ve seen in the past. There needs to be something different about the way the trick unfolds. Many of those ideas in regards to differentiating the context in which you perform can be found all over this site.
So that’s my goal when meeting a new audience. At some point (likely not immediately upon meeting them), I want to introduce the fact that I have an interest in magic. But as soon as possible after that I also want to establish that my interest has spun-off from the “traditional” sleight-of-hand card tricks they might be imagining and now it’s gone into more unusual areas.
