The Three Act Immersion Strategy
/No post today. Sorry guys.
April Fools. There is a post. And you’re reading it right now. Oh my god. You totally believed it. You big dumb dummy! You were like, “Duhr, okay… I guess I’ll go to some other site because there’s no post today.” Holy shit. You should see your face.
No… seriously. You should see your face. See it like I do. See the beauty I see in you. You are beautiful.
And that’s NO joke. That’s just a scientific fact. You’re beautiful, Dave.
(Oh, man. Can you imagine if your name is Dave and your favorite magic blogger just called you beautiful? I bet you’d be freaking out. And you’d feel ready to take on the world. But I know your name isn’t really Dave. It’s Matt.)
(Holy shit. Can you imagine if your name is Matt? And you just read that thing about Dave and you’re thinking, “Did he just throw a random name in here so it would apply to some certain percentage of his readers?” And then I specifically call you out and say, “No, that’s not what I did. This message is for you, Matt.” You probably don’t know what to think right now. But yes, I have to admit, I did just throw a random name in there so it would hit for some of you. The truth is I actually know your name is Chris.)
Where was I…
Wednesday’s post, which talks about how I split up Audience-Centric vs Magician-Centric material, also offers you a very, very simple, fast—but not abrupt—way to introduce alternative types of magic presentations to your spectators.
Now, this is a process that I normally take my time with, just because that’s what I prefer. But this is a way you can do it much more quickly. In fact, you could even do this over the course of one interaction with someone who hasn’t seen you perform before.
It would be a three-step process.
Magician-Centric Trick
Unfinished Magician-Centric Trick
Audience-Centric Trick
So you start with, whatever, Ring Flight, for example. You perform it in a standard sort of way. Borrow the ring, make it vanish, and it reappears on your keyring. Your spectator applauds this useless skill.
Now, it’s very rare to perform a trick for someone and have them immediately change the subject to something else. If you find this happening a lot. that suggests an issue with your performance.
So after the initial Magic-Centric trick, while the subject of magic is still in the air, that’s when you say something like. “Actually… would it be possible to get your help with something I’ve been working on? That thing with the keys and the ring is just an old sleight-of-hand trick. I’ve been trying to branch out and learn some…. more unusual…types of tricks. But I sort of need an outsider’s feedback to see if it works.” You’re setting up the idea that you want to show them something else (either now or at a later point in time). This thing you want to show them is something unfinished. They’re getting a peek at something that others haven’t really seen yet. And this is something stranger than the type of trick they just saw. All of this is going to build upon the interest you generated with the first trick.
So now you do your Unfinished Magician-Centric Trick. Let’s say you read their mind of a word they’re thinking. It’s a little rough, and not completely direct, but you bring it to a successful conclusion.
Now, because they’re seeing the “behind the scenes” of a “work in progress” it makes perfect sense that you’d be talking about how you go about learning these things or how you initially got into magic or something tangential to your actual performance.
That makes it very simple to transition into an Audience-Centric trick.
“If you liked that, you should see what my mentor can do. It’s insane. He can do mind reading stuff even when he’s not in the same room. Wait, let me text him.”
“I guess I initially got started when I was a kid and my neighbor taught me how to… intuit, I guess you’d say… the colors of playing cards. We wanted to get good enough so we could cheat at cards. We never got that good with the technique to know full cards. But being able to sort of feel the colors isn’t too difficult. I could probably teach you.”
“Actually, I was at a convention they hold for magicians recently, and there was this one guy off in a corner with a folding table who was selling something really strange. I have no clue how this works. If you ever stop over my place, I’ll show it to you. Oh, actually… wait. I think it might be out in my car.”
Or whatever your Audience-Centric presentation might consist of.
The nice thing about this is that each trick provides a Hook for the next trick. It’s a little three-act structure where the tricks don’t need to be tied together thematically. Instead they’re tied together by just all being part of the same world. “Here’s a finished trick. Oh, you liked that? Well, maybe you’d like to see this work in progress. Oh, you like that? Well, maybe you’d be interested in a further peek into the workings of magic, or the interests of someone who studies magic.”
The power of this structure is that it allows you to get to some far-out places pretty quickly without it being too jarring for the spectator who has only been exposed to magic presented in a traditional manner. Does that make sense, Chris?