McBride Magic Museletter
CREDIT: MCBRIDE MAGIC
Dear Friends:
Our first Museletter of the new year is from Kat Rettke. If you’ve attended Magic & Meaning, you’ve certainly met Kat. If you’ve attended one of our other events, you’ve received our 30-day-out and 10-day-out letters from her, or communicated with her about your registrations. While not a regular performer of magic herself, Kat has been an avid fan and student of magic for many years. She has become an invaluable and much-loved member of our team at the McBride Magic & Mystery School. I know you’ll enjoy her thoughts below.
From Kat Rettke:
I challenge anyone who is a magic enthusiast, an amateur or a hobbyist, to ask yourself what is it about your study of magic that you apply to your own personal or professional life? What are the theories and skills you use in your profession which are common to the skills needed for magic?
Magic clubs and other magician groups are wonderful social opportunities for those of us in the magic community. More importantly, I would guess that we have all found that learning the art of magic has been good for us in other areas of our lives, even among those of us who have no hope of ever making our living on stage.
“Great magicians are masters at analyzing their audience. They climb into their point of view… (they) create empathy with their audience, and they adjust their approach by picking up the feedback continually sent to them via audience facial expressions, applause (or its absence), gasps, laughter, the collective intake and expulsion of breath, and (above all) silence.”
– David Morey, Eugene Burger and John E. McLaughlin, Creating Business Magic
More than twenty years of my life have been spent working as a social worker, mostly in healthcare settings. I was drawn to magic as a hobby, perhaps as a way to engage in an activity completely different from how I made a living, but mostly because I was very shy. I wanted a way to break the ice with other people.
Unfortunately, I never practiced enough to develop any magic skills beyond a very beginner level, and yet…there is so much more to the story for me about how valuable magic has been to me in other areas of my life.
In my professional workplace, I would find myself thinking about parallels between some of the skills of master magicians, and skills common in different theories of counseling; for instance, the skills of empathy and listening. Although I cannot credit the study of the art of magic with teaching me the skills of listening and empathy, it has been valuable to my development of these skills. Learning about audience management, audience reactions, and body language has sharpened the listening skills and feedback techniques I have learned and used as a social worker. I enjoy learning magic performance theory as a way to explore skills important to working with people from a unique perspective. I can think of so many examples of working in healthcare settings, where I have been made aware of the power of listening and observing the body language of others, as a way to diffuse a potentially hostile situation.
“Magic itself is a gift. It can create the appreciation that things are not as they seem, and therefore, that something better is possible.”
– Robert Neale, Magic Matters Tricks & Essays
At its heart, social work as well as performance magic can inspire hope that we all have the power to change our lives for the better. I am grateful for both.
From Tobias
Thank you, Kat! You touched on a subject I’ve been thinking about quite a lot lately. After so many years helping magicians, both artistically and in a business sense, I find myself asking more and more, “but what else is it good for?”
As you point out so eloquently, the ability to pay attention and feel empathy with your audiences, to adjust your actions to their way of listening, body language and more—that’s invaluable in any communications setting. It’s also a place where more and more of us are losing capability, as “communication” increasingly involves texting, social media, and other ways where technology has created a layer in between us. The ability to make eye contact, to respond as much to a person’s presence as to their words, seems to be becoming a rare ability indeed. However, it’s one of the skills that’s essential to success as a performer…or salesperson, or manager in business, or in a personal relationship. Learning to perform magic gives us an effective and fun way to develop those skills.
There are so many other areas where magic can inspire and help us to become more capable human beings. The need for practice and rehearsal requires the learning of focus and discipline. Understanding just how we can use our voice and movement skills to direct attention, affect the emotions of those around us, and take charge of the experience our performances create—these are all skills just as important for our success in everyday life, as they are when we perform.
I could go on and on about this…and have, in fact, in the course of my several books, and my blog at http://wizardventure.com/wizardblog.html. As a matter of fact, we’re in the early stages of developing a series of talks and workshops for the corporate market, based on just these ideas. Watch this space in the coming months for more!
Speaking of events coming up soon:
We still have a few spots available for Jeff’s one-day Card, Coin & Parlor Magic Classics, which takes place on the day before the S.A.M. convention here in Las Vegas, in just a couple of weeks.
Other upcoming classes that may interest you are The History & Mystery of Tarot, and Jeff’s three Winter Training sessions in early February. You can learn more and register for these events by clicking the links in the class calendar below, or just by going directly tohttp://www.magicalwisdom.com/events.
On Tour in the U.K.
One thing on the agenda for the new year is that Jeff and Larry are launching their 20/20 Vision World Tour in England in March. They start out with the only Master Class on the tour in Deal, Kent, on the eastern coast. The Master Class is being held on Saturday and Sunday, March 21-22, 2020. Please sign up right away since only a couple seats remain. For more information and to register, go to: http://www.magicalwisdom.com/events#622.
The very next weekend, March 28-29, 2020, Jeff and Larry are conducting a very special two-day seminar titled Shaman and Showman. This first-time seminar is across the country in Blackpool. The first day is titled and focuses on “The Healing Power of Magic,” exploring in detail the fascinating relationship between the shaman and the magician, and how “magic is good medicine.” The second day is titled “The Meaning of Magic,” which will focus on how to empower your magic by developing more meaningful routines and scripts.
For information and to sign up, go to: http://www.jayfortune.co.uk/product-category/shaman-showman/
Finally, and just for my own sense of fun, our discounted rate for Magic & Meaning 2020, which was to end on December 31—will be kept open until midnight tonight, January 1. So…go register now and save yourself $50! As of midnight tonight, the tuition will go to $445.
That’s all for now.
Full steam ahead for 2020…Happy New Year to all!
Tobias Beckwith
tobias@yourmagic.com
