Those Not Performing

Hey chris, at first when person read the title of this blog and then image to recognize what is written below is difficult. But the message hidden in this picture is very amazing that if everyone perform then change is possible.

Well said, Chris.  I am often taken by surprise (shock!) at the audience (some might say fans) who scream, curse, and ridicule athletes at professional sports events when their team is not performing up to their expectations.  

When I am part of that audience, I often hear people say that they have a right to boo athletes because they’ve paid their money for a ticket.  Wow!  Really?   That’s such a bunch of crap, especially when these people scream out their obscenities in front of children in the audience.

I tend to agree that these people are somehow taking out their frustrations of their life at this moment in time.  That somehow it makes them feel better, more important, and gives them a release to boo their home town heroes.  Whatever the reason, I doubt that it ever helps to push these athletes to a better performance.

Hi Chris, thought provoking idea today. Thanks!  I see hecklers as unethical performers  trying to steal another persons audience.  They are lazy and probably slaggards. Instead of performing to cultivate their own audience, they steal anothers audience for their own use by acting out.

Generally, performers have retorts or put downs for the audience thief. 

I’d rather get some angry comments or boo from the audience than a bored audience. Boredom is what I hate the most. If people came to learn or enjoy something & they don’t get engaged (in a good or bad way), I get a little annoyed. I sometimes think I should say to a too quiet audience: “Shout, spit, cry or laugh but do something”. If I don’t get emotions flowing, my message (or it anti-thesis) is certainly not coming across. Thinking & emotions go hand in hand like an old couple.  If you can’t get loved by your audience, try to get them engaged. If you can’t get them even engaged, maybe hate is still a better avenue than boredom….

Well said.

Side note… this post reminded me of something through a point you made in the beginning… the importance of collaboration and being willing to be in the audience, regardless of the size of our own stage. Like the Jay-Z, 50, Eminem reference. Collaboration is good for many reasons and if we like someone else’s stuff, it’s okay to be in the audience to appreciate them and learn from them as well. Too many don’t celebrate the success of others nearly as much as they should.

Hi Chris, 
I see them. I see the audience in your photo, but I also see some others. Media Makers.

Take another look at your photo. I count four people making media, plus you makes six. 
The people who are not performing, but who are creating media, are, as Jay Rosen calls them, “the people formerly known as the audience.” In your post you also say that you “learn from a creative and constructive critic”… well those are people who used to be the audience, but now are contributing and sharing their thoughts on your performance with you, because you’ve given them a way to talk back. Finally, as I write this, there are 20 comments, from people formerly known as the audience.  ;-)

It’s exciting to see this happening.

I think Chris knows this, but a lot of you don’t — my first dollar I ever made in Boston was as a busker — a street musician — on the Common, back in 1978 when that was, uh, technically illegal.  Busking is legal now, and in Boston you don’t need a permit.  In Cambridge, you need a license, and depending on the year, I’ve been able to say I’m a licensed Storyteller and Beautiful Assistant (to my fiance, the magician! :).

Street musicians get their share of hecklers, but for the modern magician, it’s a constant refrain.  With a tradition of secrecy to the art, and a more recent vogue of demystification in the media (Mythbusters, Bull****, etc.), the recent crop of magicians are under fire.

This is a great metaphor — except, in real implemented flesh — of a closed vs. open source system.  Compare CGI in movies to magic in performance.  

Do little kids go to a movie and yell, “I know how they did that, they did it with COMPUTERS!”  Well, maybe some do!  And maybe at home they would, along with a few friends.  

But if a little kid on the street “debunks” a magician’s effect (please don’t call them tricks — we sometimes practice hundreds or thousands of hours) — no matter how wrong the kid is, the magician can’t say a word, but the parent almost certainly is likely to *praise* his or her little genius for interrupting everyone else’s fun and suspension of disbelief.  Bravo!  Brava!  Let’s hear it for rudeness.  Can you imagine that at Blue Man Group?  At Cirque?

One tactic we’ve adopted particularly for kids, is to promise if they keep their opinions to themselves for the sake of everyone’s enjoyment until the end of a performance — be an audience together! — we’ll teach them all how something works they can do themselves at the end.  So, together, they participate in *being* an audience so together they can participate at the end in learning a secret — which we tell them they can share or not, as they wish — but we remind them that it’s their fun, whether they chose or not, and what respecting that means during performance!

Meanwhile, we have considered doing a class series called “Magic for Makers,” for engineers and dorkbot types, where each class would introduce a classic *principle* of magic effects, some traditional effects that use it, and inviting the class to brainstorm with us to design some new effects and devices and routines around classic principles using new materials and tech, drawing on their knowledge of tech/engineering and our understanding of stage, performance, and magical effects.

For the art of magic to continue, we believe it must be open sourced fully.  This is, believe it or not, a huge cultural conflict among magic performers today.  Most magic effects are protected only by trade secret status, if that.  The web and mass media have really cracked open a lot of the old lock and key apostolic secrecy of the art, which really were breached with the library, literacy, and cheap printing systems of the late 1800s.  Why are we keeping the barn doors locked?

We’d better stop looking at the barn doors and remembering the audience!  They’re not laughing in amazement at the effects, anymore.