Interview with Derren (before he was famous!)

Reviewed by Luke Jermay Around 1999/2000 Source: groups.yahoo.com

A post from Yahoo! Groups by "maltedmilkaregreat" reveals an interview with Derren which took place 2/3 years ago (around 1999/2000).

What's your main aim in magic?

My aim is to provide something that looks and feels like real magic to my audiences. Without getting into the New-agey pretentious nonsense too often given in place of intelligent and well-realised performance, I do feel that magic has the potential to really touch people, and to be a genuine artistic endeavour. The desire to provide 'real magic' may seem straightforward, but I mean it absolutely seriously... it means understanding your audience at all times, overhauling your performance, finding your personal vision, and following that aesthetic relentlessly and without compromise. Of course one must also check it's getting the desired result. There are plenty of magicians who aim high but despite their rhetoric just look daft or sound silly in performance. I also try and produce magic that is dramatically sound. Magic is bad drama, it's all effect and no cause. A click of the fingers and something occurs. That's not drama, that's just playing God. In a dramatic situation the magician would be cast as the hero, a human with a skill, a vulnerable and appealing character with a promise of the divine, but at some price. He would have a goal - the effect of the trick - but the world would offer resistance. There would be emotional investment from him, and his audience, as he tries to arrange the forces in his environment to allow for a glimmer of magic from the chthonic realm in which he has a foothold, but his control would be tentative. This may sound disproportionate or heavy-handed in the abstract, but once you perform magic with this more resonant role for yourself lightly and sensitively in mind, your performance becomes far more affecting. And good theatre.

How do you begin Creating magic?

Usually I start with an image, maybe even a gesture or a phrase that seems to me to be resonant, and which would express something of what I would like to say in performance. I go off for long walks and let ideas hatch. The feeling when you put the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle in place and know you have a routine that captures you perfectly is what it's all about. I have a good friend who lives nearby who is a very talented actor as well as a magician, and I'll talk my ideas through with him. I value his understanding of theatre. Then I'll usually write out the lines I'm going to use, and fine tune it so that I'm using the right words to create the metaphor or sense that I wish, and to ensure that the pacing and rhythm are just right. I'll try it on friends who will be honest and comprehensive in their feedback, and there we are. Or I just steal other people's material.

When did you first realise your performance style?

I remember a chap coming up to me in 1997 or so after a table-hopping gig and telling me about a magician he'd seen twenty years before in a pub. We've all had that, and it's interesting trying to work out what the original effect might have been that is being currently embellished beyond clear recognition. But I realised that the magic that I was performing was going to be their anecdotes in twenty years' time. I really wasn't treating it seriously enough to respect that. It is common amongst magicians to feel that whilst table-hopping you have to perform rubbish in order to get round everyone quickly. I find that idea terrible now. That incident really stopped me in my tracks. Also, sitting with Eugene Burger for a while in London made me see that a feeling of magic should be created well before the tricks start. I saw the importance of getting a group to really want to see something before I started, rather than forcing it on them before they are responsive and ready. Once I started to change things, I also changed what I wore, how I approached people, and doubled my fees. This helped massively too: I felt I should be providing something special. I remember sitting in the lounge-bar where I have a residency and wondering how I'd feel if a magician came up to me. I got a very clear idea of what would be appropriate and delightful, and what would just be grating. That was a moment of lucidity, too.

Since then I have come to understand more clearly what I want to do, and the vision I wish to follow. At the same time, the more up-beat style, mixed with pick-pocketing, is still there to fall back on when I find myself trapped in noisy, busy events. But it's no longer what I feel my magic is about. After ten years of doing this professionally and growing a little blase about it, it is so rewarding to have something to fuel your performance. It's suddenly very challenging again, suddenly very worthwhile. Having something to give rather than just being the hired entertainer: well worth it.

Biggest influences?

Within magic, I owe much to long conversations with Teller. We share similar passions, and, not being used to talking magic with anybody, I found my ideas being clarified by having them restated and criticised by someone who has had a real feel for theatre for much longer than I. I do take what I do seriously, and it is rare to find professional magicians who feel the same and are happy to talk unapologetically about it. Teller does, and I am deeply indebted to him. Outside of magic, I can think of my parents as being the biggest shapers of my life. I should probably also name Martin Taylor, a hypnotist I saw that unwittingly got me into all this when I was a student. He hasn't influenced my magic, but if I'd have never got into it at all, I imagine I'd be very different now.

Type of magic most enjoyed?

Magic that makes me like the performer. Magic with drama and a vision behind it, and which meets its audience with respect and understanding.

Least enjoyed?

Vapid, mindless and irrelevant manipulation acts with no meaning or understanding of wonder behind them; close-up magic performed by rude, charm less men who have no business approaching a group at its restaurant table. I suppose that's pretty much all magic performed by people that have no love of the subtlety of their art and no respect for what an audience would want to see. It's particularly bad in a close-up situation, where it is often not feasible to escape the over-bearing, humiliating figure with his ghastly magician's necktie and rubbish about black cards being heavier than red cards and so on. That I find unforgivable, and I know I was doing it like that myself at one point. Plain rude. Also, briefly, rope magic. I mean honestly. Ropes? Come on.

Fave Magician?

Teller, clearly, also Jerry Sadowitz, Dai Vernon, Hofzinser and Tom Mullica. Teller for reasons already given. Jerry because I admire him as a serious artist, and his magic is the only stuff that isn't mine that I would ever want to do. I wouldn't do it, for it destroys the point of creating if you're going to do other people's material, but I love watching it. Above all he has a persona that is bigger than his magic, far bigger and famously severe. How often do we see a magician and feel real apprehension? The last thing magic should be is bland and safe, and I am very interested in anybody who can genuinely look beyond that. Vernon for reasons echoed throughout the fraternity. Hofzinser for his delight in whimsy and appreciation for the romance of the art. Mullica because, again, he has a vision and realises it perfectly. I don't feel that magic needs comedy, but when it's done that well, one can only delight in its success. What I want to see in a magician is the realisation of their vision, uncompromised and pure. I want to be watching something personal and elegantly honed, not an exercise in slickness, gags and applause cues. Above all, I want the magician to be more than the sum of his effects. I want him to be ther Greater Effect, and his tricks to be mere unimportant methodologies to achieving that. In the same way that we learn that effect is all and method unimportant, so the same should apply to the meta-performance, if I can call it that without inducing nausea and vomiting. The effect of the character of the magician should be all. We are just watching a few demonstrations, but there should be the sense of much withheld. I want to be intrigued and captured by the performer, aside from his tricks, and when he does perform a routine, to sense its congruence with the intriguing personality of the man before me. Perhaps it's a British thing, but I feel this is more effective when it's done subtly. Withholding means precisely that: the promise of further wonder and deep mystery in a gesture or a silence, as opposed to a choosing a camp two-dimensional imitation of a 'mysterious' stereotype as a performance character. Nothing is really withheld there, there is no real elegance.

Fave magic book?

I don't read books of tricks any more, although I'll watch performances or lectures to get a sense of another magician's approach to performance and the way that they imprint their personality on the audience. As something of a bilbliophile, I sympathise with those that say that books are worth far more than lecture videos. Perhaps, but you need to see a performance for the effect to come alive. And presuming that you don't just want to go through a book and pick out a whole load of effects to do, I feel they have limited value. The only contact I really have with the 'learning effects' market now is borrowing tapes and watching the performances, fast-forwarding through the explanations. If you are trying to follow your own vision and not be distracted, seeing or reading other people's stuff can be either irrelevant or infuriatingly appealing. I find the latter can be the case with Guy Hollingworth's 'Drawing Room Deceptions': we have different ideas about magic, but his methodologies are so delightful to practise that I can spend hours immersed in fiddling and come up with ideas that take me way off course and very far from the aesthetic I am trying to realise. There are few magic books that I have really enjoyed. I imagine that Darwin Ortiz' 'Strong Magic' would be top of the list, and it is criminal that this book is now out of print. This is a densely packed work on showmanship and improving your performance, free of the old-fashioned dicta or smug aphorism of other works on the subject. Other than that I enjoy reading biographical works and character studies of the greats: I really enjoyed Vernon's book on Malini. The collected 'Jinx' has a real charm about it as well: marvellous to read.

Fave non-magic book.?

Boswell's 'London Journals', most probably. I delight in his flamboyant arrogance and his bombastic whoring, if that doesn't make me sound at all objectionable. Followed by Nietzsche, along with Dostoievsky's novels. I am also a enjoy Robertson Davies - his 'A Voice from the Attic', a treatise on books and the practice of reading as well as ventures into his own enthusiasms such as Ninetheenth Century melodrama and Where To Find Erotica In Europe: this was a great read. For guilty pleasure, I'd recommend 'Faking It: The Sentimentalisation of Modern Society', put out by The Social Affairs Unit, 1998. It's a series of essays dealing with areas as diverse as the welfare system, food, music, health, religion and environment: a huge onslaught against feel-good sentimentality. Great stuff.