Competitions and why I do them!

Why would anyone want to face their peers to perform and be judged?

As a magician who specialises in children’s magic and family friendly corporate stage magic, it is often difficult to get an over view of where you sit in the magic community. Most of our work is for private clients so we don’t often get to see each other work in a real life situation so by taking part in a competition you also get to see others working. This does meen you are going to be judged along side them and lets face it, you might not win!

Winning is not and should not be your main aim in taking part in magic competitions, although it is nice to win. My aim when I take part in a magic competition is to move my magic up a level. It is too easy to coast along doing what you have always done but when it comes to performing magic in a competition it makes you re look at what you are doing and finding new ways to be the best magician you can be.

Magic competitions are usually much shorter performances than your normal show so everything has to be tighter. For this years Children’s Entertainer of The Year competition I used magic tricks that have been in my children’s parties for a while but due to the time constraints I tightened up the scripts and then added extra music to make the magic more dynamic. I was very please to be awarded first prize, best children’s entertainer 2014 but I am also please with how it has made my magic parties even better than they were before.

This week I also entered the Cotswold Magical Society’s stage competition, this had a separate category of best comedy magician, this was my goal. as all the stage magic I perform for adult and family audiences is done with humour. I put together a special 10 minute comedy magic stage show featuring the “lost sock mystery” and some comedy mind reading with a nod to Uri Geller. At the end of the evening I was awarded the Sylvester wand for Best Comedy Magician.

Stroud close up magician
Magician of the year 2014

Although as I said at the beginning, winning is not everything, it’s very nice.