Do you have a performance persona? Is your personality and behavior different when you are performing than in your day-to-day life?

For many performers, a great deal of comfort can be found by embodying a ‘character’.

Most stand-up comedians develop and utilize a performance persona. It isn’t always a vast departure from their true being, but comedians tend to choose one or two aspects of their personality and greatly exaggerate them. By doing so, they not only grab the audience’s attention, but begin to behave in such a way that backs up their material. More often than not, it is what the type of material they write that informs how they should change their behavior.

David Blaine, after beginning to develop his sleight-of-hand claims to have returned to the art of acting in hopes of refining and specifying his act. By asking the question “how would someone who was truly magical behave?”

How would a true wizard amongst the muggles behave? Casually and flippantly? As a stoic mystic? Confident or unsure? Nervous to share magic with those who can’t understand, or earnest to blow minds? Is it a secret that has been discovered, or an innate gift? Is it hard to harness the powers of magic, or is it something that comes easily?

It is a question that can be answered many ways, and while some choices may seem stronger than others, I believe that like a stand-up, it is most helpful to let your material sculpt your style. David Blaine, for example, found quickly that the ‘Stoic Mystic’ worked best for him. He makes some effects seem very hard to achieve, require great concentration, focus, and no-nonsense. He even feigns pain sometimes: performing a levitation, and then collapsing to the ground as if damaged and drained. For the audience, his ‘character’s behaviors greatly impact the effect of everything he does, and, in their minds, makes everything much more credible.

The person I am when I perform magic, I refer to as ‘the accidental magician.’ I have been developing this character for several years now. For him, the “magic” does the hard work, and is often more powerful than him. He is earnest but sometimes wary. I perform this way because I noticed a great deal of my tricks contain a series of reveals, each one more impacting. I always let the last reveal, which is most sudden, surprise even myself by misleading the audience that the trick was already over. Then, the magic happens, and by making it a group surprise which is seemingly out of my control, spectators loose it. Now, of course spectators catch on after a routine, but rather than distrust the act they grow endeared, as if discovering that “this guy really does know what he’s doing! ”

I think developing your own persona is easy, but the most important thing is to give yourself one ‘given’- that when you begin performing, as far as you’re concerned there is no such thing as a ‘magic trick’, but that magic is real, and you’re on of the few who can use it.