Hope this might of help to some of you...

I was having coffee with a friend (layman in magic) last night and we started to talk about magic.

Althought he is a layman, he has always love to watch magic since young. In fact, I invited him to the Legerdemain and he gave me some valuable feedback after the event.

One of the things we touched on was about audience's response.

In this aspect, we magicians tend blame local audience for being too unresponsive and skeptical. But he pointed out to me that, many a times, it is due to the magicians themselves failing to excite the audience.

Here are 10 mistakes made by magicians he had personally came across:

1. speak too fast.

2. speak too softly and unconfident.

3. talk in a monotonous voice like the Undertaker (WWE)."

4. action too fast or moment of magic can't be see..

5. lengthy opening and very little magic.

6. corny and unfunny jokes.

7. appeared unprepared and flashes.

8. doing common effects which has been shown on TV.

9. too nervous and let it show.

10. failing to engage the audience, only interested in entertaining themselves.

This is true.

One of the things I absolutely detest are performers who blame the audience for lack of response. This phenomenon can affect performers from all genres - I have seen actors, musicians, and yes, magicians all fall prey to the delusion that the audience is at fault for their lack of reactions.

Magicians are particularly guilty however, since we also tend to mislabel perfectly normal human beings as 'hecklers'. Which also makes me mad, but it's a topic for another day.

Anyway.

Good list of all the common presentation mistakes magicians tend to make. I think that we all are guilty of making all of these mistakes at some point.

Anyone who claims otherwise is lying.

The more important thing to do is remember the lessons learnt and don't repeat the mistakes.

Yes, agreed. Sometimes I could hear people complaining about the poor response from the crowd. Or making statements like Singaporean don't appreciate the art of magic.

yea, it is not easy. Audience management is another challenging task we all have to take into consideration :)

i dont think that singaporean dont appreciate magic.....but some people in singapore feel that they get cheated when we do magic...so they act like they dont get cheat

Agreed that Singaporeans' reaction are not so strong as what we expected or sees in some dvds. One evidence is when Cyril came to Singapore and went for the interview in Channel NewsAsia. He performed Linking Mints with polo sweets very well. But the reporters didn't even do anything, they just like ok? Then Cyril continued by saying " you sound like you see this everyday" the female reporter replied "yeah".

I mean LINKING MINTS! such a strong visual effect. The mints visually link, the response he got from other people in other countries was so strong but in Singapore?

LINKING MINT cyril ...look like the audience just act shock...that what i feel .dont mean anything

Have you got any good reactions before? Cause when they get shocked, its quite normal. I had a friend that believed i could control minds after doing a NLP test.

Maybe the reporter really did see it before. Either on the online tube or tv or maybe a little nephew showed it to her after learning from the tube.

At times like this, we must realized there are too many effects that are performed to death, and the worst thing is, many people performed it EXACTLY like what others are doing. Can we blame spec for feeling a bit "underwhelmed"?

If we are a bit hardworking, we can certainly unearthed many gems in sources other than the net.

I strongly disagree. In fact I think Singaporean reactions are the most sincere - culturally speaking we are the least predisposed to false displays of appreciation. Some magicians who fail to elicit reactions call this 'cynicism'. I call it 'honesty'.

Basically if you perform a lousy effect you will get a lousy reaction instead of fake applause.

The linking polo mints is an example of a lousy effect.

Yes I said it, its LOUSY. Its meaningless, FAR too small for the camera to capture effectively, and even worse, its also over handled for such a tiny effect.

Nobody cares that you can link polo mints. It benefits nobody, there is no emotional connection, and the effect (penetration) is a common one. It is an example of a stupid effect using a stupid object.

I think the hosts were already very courteous by smiling. I would have felt mildly insulted that a big name magician who came on my show can't even put in the effort to display something more befitting his fame than linking 2 small pieces of sugar.

I somehow agree. When he was performing at the Golden Horse award in 2007. I doubt the audience on the floor enjoy the effect of an ACR performed on stage. In my opinion, this trick is kind of too small for such a big show.