Many effects in magic can be amplified by creating a specific “moment of magic.” A simple action like passing your hand over the deck, clicking your fingers or blowing at your hand may seem strange, but I’ve found that using such a moment in my magic helps establish exactly when the magic happens. This isn’t exclusive to those performers that claim special powers – even if you present your magic as purely sleight of hand, a moment of magic still lets the audience know when the sleight was supposed to have been executed.

A simple example is clicking your fingers over your hand just before you show that the coin has vanished. Of course, method wise the coin has been gone for a long time, but as far as your audience should be concerned, that coin didn’t vanish until the moment you clicked your fingers.

While creating a magical moment is a great thing, I often see magicians trivialise it by making a joke, doing a silly action or generally not taking it seriously. If you are one of those people, I urge you to experiment by not saying a thing while creating that moment of magic and let your magic speak for itself. Just slowly pass your hand over the focal point, look up at your audience and then reveal what you have achieved. It sounds weird to do that, but you’ll be amazed at how much better reaction you’ll receive. Just taking a moment out and being quite for a few seconds symbolises that something important is happening and allows the focus to be fully on the magic.

In brief, my point is that if you’re going to create, establish and build up moment of magic (i.e. perform a trick) don’t ever step on that moment (to use a Paul Harris phrase) – it’ll have adverse effects to what you originally intended.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 1:58 pm and is filed under General magic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.