Assigning Tropes to Your Magic Spectators

Most hobbyists don't have the time or the setup to build their performances the way a stage or TV performer would. Improvisation is common, and so are effects that work with borrowed objects.

That's a kind of freedom that opens up real possibilities, some of which even pros don't have, since they often can't afford to perform anywhere, anytime.

Because of this, it's worth knowing a few shortcuts that let you deliver strong magic in any situation—even when you don't have a scripted routine from start to finish, or when a performance begins on the spot with little preparation.

I've written about some of these shortcuts before: the idea of leaving your audience with impossible objects, how to delay the ending of your magic routines, or how to make people believe your magic can't be repeated.

There's another very interesting one, and that some magicians already do without thinking about it: assigning predefined roles to people in the audience, so you can recreate dynamics and situations you already know how to navigate.

This shortcut came back to me recently, when I went to see a magic show that was, honestly, pretty bad.

Between one confused routine and the next, something started taking shape almost by accident: a spectator in the front row kept failing to follow the performer's instructions. Sometimes he didn't understand, sometimes the performer explained badly, sometimes he just did the wrong thing entirely.

After the second time it happened, the audience found it hilarious. Every time that spectator was brought into a routine, everyone in the room was on their toes, waiting to see what would go wrong this time.

It was genuinely entertaining as a dynamic. But the performer never noticed. After calling on this person a few times—simply because he was sitting in the front row—he stopped giving him attention. And by doing that, he lost the only opportunity to make the show more entertaining than he could have managed on his own.

As magicians, our job is to entertain. That's the main thing. The more fooling our magic is, the better, but that alone will never be the reason an audience truly appreciates us.

The best magicians in the eyes of a lay audience aren't necessarily the most technically skilled or the most studied. They're the ones with a great character, an original message to communicate, and who are—overall—entertaining.

And since most of us already know enough routines to fill hours of magic for friends and family, what we often lack are precisely the shortcuts that turn those routines into something genuinely entertaining.

Assigning specific roles to your audience is one of those strategies.

If that performer had used the relationship with the "unruly" spectator to build something deliberate—and possibly turned this difficult person into a hero for the entire audience—the show would have become far more interesting.

And he wouldn't have needed to start from scratch. He could have done the same thing every time a spectator like that showed up, using the same routines and refining the process over time. The natural endpoint is then learning to identify that kind of person from the start of the show, and giving them that role on purpose.

A magician who does this well is Dani DaOrtiz. On multiple occasions, DaOrtiz has talked about how he selects the people who sit around his table in ways that are always the same. He makes sure he has people of different ages and genders, but always in the same pattern, so he can behave the same way every time and create recurring tropes within his audience.

It's a fascinating element, and one that can be of real help to hobbyists who choose not to plan their performances too much. The only constant in any live magic performance is the audience itself. And that means you can treat it as part of your method.