I was alerted by a chiming sound on my phone the other day. This happened while I sat sipping a cup of tea at a favorite haunt, a local cafe where I like to read my paper and muse on the day ahead. I raised the phone. It was an alert for a magic show that I had told a friend about, with a view to attending. The friend had never seen magic in real life and I was intrigued to see the reaction.
It strikes me that an awful lot of our pursuit revolves around getting your work seen. That’s the challenge as you embark on getting it out there in front of a wider world. The opportunities to show your work in 2025 are numerous, with many paths to take. To me that is quite wonderful.
I remember the thrill—and nerves—experienced in showing something for the first time to some friends. For me, it was a demonstration of getting a card somehow to arrive on the top of a deck. It was very much a demonstration in those days, I might add, and not much performance, but nevertheless I did get a surprisingly good response. (I think they might have been a bit drunk, but among friends that could help.) I was aware of my limitations, so I used the conceit of having someone covering my hands with a bar cloth and instantly throwing it off to show that the apparently lost card had somehow appeared. It was an exhibition of speed to be sure, not much in the way of magic or mystery. But as I now think of it, it was my instinctive way of using a bigger action to disguise a lesser one: all of that to cover a pass. This was simple camouflage, of course, to hide my novice handling. But I was hooked. I then became fascinated with making it seem more magical to my audience.