Welcome To the Battle Field: Your Audience’s Mind

The best performers know that the show isn’t the one that is physically shown to the audience, but the show that is playing within their audience’s minds and hearts. What is the difference? Most people think that magic is done through strictly knowing how to do secret moves and execution. That is only partly true – and a very small part. You can know how a trick might be done, but to sell it is a whole different story. In the art of Dramatic Theatre and Film, there is a term called “suspended disbelief.” Suspended Disbelief is when your audience chooses to let go of the reality they live in and accept what the performance gives to them. Getting to this “acceptance” is much easier in certain groups or situations. In the venues of play stages and your local movie theatre, there are basic conventions or “rules” that people follow accept what is being shown them when those productions are in progress. In these situations, suspended disbelief is not only an easily taken role, but it’s expected. This happens also for stage magicians because a lot of the time, their audiences is sat amongst each other. In all three of the situations, they are all paying to be the audience. What I want to do is inspire people around me to be my audience.



In my style of Impromtu magic, you take and create an audience, even when they don’t readily accept the role of being your audience. This is a very tricky role to play into. As a performer, I want to entertain or mislead those I am “acting” for to elicit certain responses that I want them to have. Maybe they look sad, and I want them to smile, or laugh. Sometimes people are just in too serious or uptight of a mood, and it’s good to loosen them up. How about getting on the good side of a police officer when he pulls you over? (I am on parole, so coming off as a nice and “ordinary” civilian for a minor fault is better than being pegged as some punk who happened to be an ex-felon and being placed cuffed in the back of a police wagon.) In each situation, I see a war going on; however, at the same time, they are to be your ally and friend at the same time. In the tight circle of “friends” I had in prison, we used to call those neutral inmates that may later become our friend or foe, “Friend-Of-Me’s.” At first sight it looks like an inside and joking way of saying “Friend of Mine,” and it was created just in that way so it can be said in the open without suspicion. The real meaning of the word was to mean “Frienemy,” which meant friend in the open but potential enemy. In prison, this was the very case. Anyone that got close to you from a neutral position can become your enemy at any second. In the case of performing, you go to your “Frienemy,” and make them your ally.


How about some back stories of how I learned about this? In prison, they had these two routines that you had to go through that would be demeaning and downright inhumane to a normal person. The processes are well known as “strip-searches,” and “shake-downs.” In both cases, the Correctional Officers were in search of “contraband.” Contraband is any item that an inmate is not allowed to have. Prisoners would use and sell drugs, weapons, and any item that was deemed worthwhile inside the prison world. The $5 pack of cigarettes at the gas station is worth $40 - $60 inside, especially once prison officials decided to outlaw them – thereby creating a black market. The magic came in when your writer himself possessed cash money, tobacco, and my personal cell phones. (And No, I did not Keister or Butt any item up my anus to hide it.) Until the day I left those prisons, I was never caught with any of the contraband I had, while countless others did.



So the stage is set. The magic effect was to allow the Correctional Officers, who routinely strip-searched me and shook down the cell I resided in, to believe I was a rule following inmate. The location of the performance is whenever they surprised us with a search, and in our cells. The audience were the officers searching, the Sergeant watching those two officers in search, and the Lieutenant watching the Sergeants on the tier. By this time, I was already prepared by hiding the all the contraband, and being careful to use all my senses. Books like Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, and countless texts on Body Language were already read as if they contained the meaning of life itself. The two tools used extensively here was the ability to manipulate reputation and use charisma, while at the same time persuade with body language and read theirs. All of these things boil down to two very distinct uses of expectations. Knowing your audience’s stereotypes, motivations, and responses help tremendously. Having your audience think they are correct about their expectations of you is also a great persuasive weapon.


The character I played after some very thoughtful evaluation is of a person who really stuck out in prison. Yes, I am going to state right here and now that being Asian was an advantage. There are very few Asians in prison in the East Coast, and in the prison I was in, I was one of only two. (The other fellow just happened to be in a Mental Health Unit.) I was very nice to the Correctional Officers because I chose to see them as people also, not only as my enemies – in turn, I was the nice fellow that I portrayed. (Only in certain situations like shake-downs do the roles play an issue.) I sometimes performed simple tricks around the Officers, but I would intentionally flub the trick up on purpose. So when those who came into my cell and saw the mass of books on many topics didn’t see me as any threat. I had to learn the signals when something was amiss and the body language involved when and if officers came for a surprise hit. When the dayroom or tier was quiet, something was wrong. If everyone is listening or attentive, it’s either someone was being assaulted or stabbed, or they were observing irregular movement. The final character preparation I had to indulge in was the chess game within myself. I had to ask myself if what I was doing was wrong. No, what I did was not wrong. There is nothing wrong with possessing money, tobacco to get said money, and a cell phone to talk to my friends and family. In my mind, I had to make sure that the rules put in place were not as important as my personal principles that conflicted with them. So I had to rationalize and justify what I did to be able to sell my character on the spot.


I hid the cell phones and tobacco in the desk and that the prison supplied in each and every cell. The expectation is of the furniture being specifically made so that they were not able to hide anything. The drawers were welded so they would not come out and that you can open the doors and look everywhere within the desks. What I have learned from these expectations is to go with the flow. The strength of these desks was also their weakness. I exploited the drawer’s inability to be released and the 4 x 2 inches of blind spot that they gave me with the drawers open. This little blind spot within the “armpits” of the drawer on both sides was what I used to hide my cell phones and tobacco. Usually, officers used their flashlights to light up this spot, and an inmate who hid things there would be caught easily. What I did that the other inmates didn’t was to innovate the addition of a box in these armpits with a difference of 2/8ths of an inch. The color of the inside of these desks was light brown, which happen to be the same exact color of a file folder. I cut a box and placed it in these arm pits with the opening pointing inside the desks. If and when the officers did flashlight the inside, they would see the box, but it looked like a part of the inner desk. (I affixed the box to the desk with glue and used clear tape to cover the box so when a light hit the surface, it shined like metal once their flashlights were used– another expectation and advantage of the officers I turned around on them that was tested with the light from a cell phone.) The second problem was that the officers would be able to open the door and look inside easily. I fixed the problem by placing the desk near the front of the cell in the entrance. In this space were a sink and the toilet we used inside our own cells. Most of the officers were very lazy from either searching other cells, and just sloths in general. I placed the desk there because I knew generally it would be much more effort to bend down in that tiny space, and they weren’t going to move the desk for the same reasons. I took a great chance on each shake-down, but the psychology behind this was fairly simple. No one is going to bend down if they don’t have to, and they will not bend down where people use the bathroom at. (I am sure they dreaded cleaning their laboratory at home.)


As for the money that I hid, I put them in Sharpies. If we all look at a sharpie marker, most of think that they are filled with some magical permanent liquid that we would not want spilled on us. What I found out through some curiosity was that if you bent a Sharpie marker, that they have the same ink sponge the rest of markers have. Money being light and throwing the Sharpie marker amongst other art supplies I had literally gave me an easy hiding spot for a few hundred dollars. I also hid a scaled down flash drive and a blue tooth ear piece for my cell phone inside a larger Sharpie.



The performance as they were shaking me down would be simple. Greet the officers that were going to shake my cell down. As they were my enemy in war playing a role, to them, I was their friend, being helpful with anything they wanted. They usually stripped you naked and made you cough and squat. Right after that, they put cuffs on you and make you sit in a chair. Many times I usually just walk to the chair and hit it pushing it with my shin, and subtly fall down on the chair turning it some more. The chair was always pointed inside the cell so you can watch them shaking down your cell. All the inmates watched their cells being destroyed in which later they must clean. As I wanted to be different, I chose a tactic of not watching my cell being searched, and turning the chair was the first priority. Then I would be pointed toward the Sergeant, and dependent on the sex and how well I knew them, I’d strike up a conversation. This caused two things to happen. First, my body language was one of being unconcerned about these two people thrashing about my cell looking for contraband; I was telling them non verbally that there was nothing there to be found. The second thing was that I took the pressure off of them by taking the Sergeant’s attention off them and how specific they did their job. The conversations made the time enjoyable, the shake down time go past much faster in my cell because I controlled it through the interaction, and I talked about things with beginnings and ends. Soon enough, the Sergeant would be worried about him or her talking to me very friendly like in front of the Lieutenant down the hall, and tell the searching team to wrap it up. I was never caught, and I had to wing some things here time to time, but with the preparation and understanding of the audience and creating the audience, I was in control even when I looked like I wasn’t.



The whole point of this is that in Magic, you are performing inside another person’s mind. The expectations involved allow you to create baits and traps for your own purposes. If you know what motivates people, you can exploit it. Whatever a person wants is their weakness. Anyone can be your audience. If you review the paragraphs above, would you believe that the hiding fixtures were more important, or were the psychology behind how I inspired the officers to believe something about me was more important? I think you are smart enough to deduce that the psychology and what the officers were thinking and feeling are more important. Until this day, all those many officers believe me to be a rule following inmate. I created a reality for them, and to them, this reality is still persistent unless they read this blog. You can see your audience as both your enemy and your friend, but in the end, what matters is what goes on in their mind. If you fail their thinking and tests, well, you fail as a performer. A key to all this was not only preparing hiding places, but about thinking deeply about what could and would be, and creating that reality whenever the time arises.




(Please note, the pictures of me are ones taken from my cell phone in prison. Notice the bars and the grey top and jean uniform! Only a few of you might have figured that out in the beginning…ask yourself, what were your expectations? Did you believe me to be that vain? )