Why Use Magic Tricks With Sponges?

My advice is, if you don’t already do SOME kind of sponge magic you are NUTS! Almost nothing is stronger than when people open their hand and those extra sponges appear. It always takes them “right back to wonder.” I worked with classic red balls for years, but I got sick and tired of playing hide and seek with them when they rolled off the table. I also got sick of the clown nose comments. This is why I further developed sponge magic. I have spent many years developing... Read more »

Magicians Can Captivate an Audience with Mystery

A lack of understanding does not necessarily create a sense of mystery. A confusing magic effect is a perfect example of this. (Though “a confused magic effect” may be a more accurate phrase because there are far fewer inherently confusing effects than there are confusing ways of presenting effects.) If you share an effect with your audience and unintentionally lose them somewhere along the way, perhaps because you raced through an important part of neglected to clarify an initial condition,... Read more »

Magicians Creating Intimacy During a Performance

I love the intimacy of close-up magic and especially the challenging work of maintaining a variety of relationships with several people at the same time. This maintenance is achieved in many ways, though ultimately much of it comes down to sigh, sound and touch. Glances, words and physical contact. Of course, very few routines are constructed in such a way that you touch every member of the audience (without going to jail.) Though you can direct your comments towards a single member of a crowd,... Read more »

Orchestrating Focus is Critical in a Magician’s Set

Below are nine principles regarding the audience’s visual experience of a performance of magic. Magicians that understand these principles will know how to work their routine in harmony with these principles, ultimately creating a more successful production. 1- During the performance of an effect the audience is always looking somewhere. 2- Each spectator sees/gathers a series of images during the effect. 3- Spectators often gather slightly or even starkly different images depending on a wide... Read more »

The Edinburgh Fringe and the Great Beyond

The Fringe Festival has been in existence for just as long as the Edinburgh Festival proper. Both inceptions are inextricably knitted together and began life bound up way back in 1947. Our story begins when what can only sufficiently be described as a mob of eight theatre companies turned up uninvited to the newly formed Edinburgh International Festival. Taking advantage of the huge crowds pulled in by the official festivities, these rogue gatecrashers bolstered their way in with one grisly intent:... Read more »

The Austin Museum of Art (AMOA)

This is truly a museum for the casual and creative Austinite. With two locations and loads of interesting exhibits and programs, AMOA is a great cultural destination for students, adults, and even parents and caregivers of young children. The downtown location is a sleek and modern space, while the Laguna Gloria campus, AMOA’s original home, is housed within a 1916 Italiante villa. The primary home of the AMOA Art School, Laguna Gloria is located on property once owned by Stephen F. Austin,... Read more »

Celebrity Obsession A Stage Too Far?

Author, director, comedian, physician and all round polymath Jonathan Miller has been all over The Times and the BBC this week running the West End into the proverbial square ditch. Miller insisted that because his version of Hamlet was cast by relative unknowns he couldn’t get a gig in the West End. “Producers might have been swayed” he contends, “if I’d been prepared to put in for more luminous names”. Attacks may not come any more thinly veiled than that, but... Read more »

Digital Ash In A Digital Urn: Does The Digital Age Mean The Death Sentence For Live Theatre?

With so much content beaming freely across the web, consumers have never had such unfettered access to entertainment. Dilating bandwiths have meant data transfers have shrunk to infinitesimal speeds and, as entire fleets of pirate P2P websites and media data streamers career off all over the place, the notion of actually paying for entertainment is quickly becoming rather odious. With a West End theatre seat costing you easily in excess of 20GBP, the economic future of live drama is looking decidedly... Read more »

Bollywood Choreographers And Much More

Bollywood Choreographers make it easy to understand Hindi or bollywood film dance. A choreographer of Indian origin can better assist you learning bollywood dances.It’s always eye-pleasing to see bollywood dances and probably you will think to learn bollywood dancing yourself because it looks very simple. Many dance competition are being held in India where Farah Khan, Saroj khan and other big choreographers are present as judge. People like to enjoy the dances but altogether they want to... Read more »

Rising Theatre Audiences - Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

The darkening financial climate is pretty much unavoidable at the minute. If you’re not queuing up at the supermarket spending 15% more for half a dozen eggs than you would have done five minutes ago, then 150 journalists and financial advisors are lined up round the block to tell you about it. Fuel costs are rocketing to record new heights and the price of a barrel of crude oil, if you really wanted to buy one, is nearing the astronomical sum of $200. That, of course, is not nearly the half... Read more »