"Perceiving how good someone is is highly individualised and multifaceted"

On the one hand, I would distinguish between how well the artist masters the tools of his art, i.e. how perfect the illusion is, how good his dexterity is, how excellently the trick and the illusion are performed. Secondly, and I think this is the more important point, how good is the performer as a person. Does he have charisma, does he manage to inspire the audience with his show as a whole, with his entertainment? Does the magician have entertainment value? Is the magician able to react to the individual situation of the event and is he able to captivate the audience immediately?

The pure technique of the trick, the magic trick itself, then becomes almost irrelevant, because it is basically about the entertainment that the artist offers as a whole. The audience will remember the whole show as an experience, the entertainment, the amusement, the good time they had as an audience and the amazement as an overall experience. So a good magician is, above all, a good entertainer. He has to be fun, he has to make people lose themselves, he has to fascinate them, he has to make them forget everyday life. If he then succeeds in making sure that the guests have no explanation for what they have experienced, then he has achieved his goal. Christoph Kuch writes in his book "Don't be superstitious, it's bad luck" that for us magicians the tricks should only be a means to an end. "What really counts is entertaining people. Magic lives from passion. You can only become good if you love, live, think and feel something" (1).

Much of this has to do with the likeability of the performer on stage. If the performer is simply unappealing, insecure and lacks confidence, it will be much more difficult for the artist to captivate the audience. An essential characteristic is the way the performer interacts with the audience. This should show the spectator in the best light, not from above, but on the contrary, the guest must be the star on the stage. For this, the magician needs life experience, skill and a certain flair for dealing with the audience. Routine helps, and an old hand is much more confident than a 20-year-old just starting out.

When magicians can react appropriately to any situation on stage, it is a sign that they have years of stage experience and are comfortable with guests. In a podcast with Marvin Berglas (son of world-renowned magician David Berglas), he says that you can tell a good performer is one who has a large number of regular customers who book the performer on a regular basis. This shows that the organisers are not just booking the magician once, but that they can rely on the artist to create a great atmosphere and rock the audience (2).

The Magic Lab at the University of Plymouth is currently researching the characteristics that distinguish a professional magician from a beginner (3). The following characteristics shed light on this:

When he performs, he knows what it looks like from the audience's point of view and what effect he has from the audience's point of view.

The magician carefully plans the staging, choreography, lighting and other aspects of the dramaturgy of his performances.

Incidentally, the "too perfect theory" states that a trick that is too perfect is paradoxically less impressive. The theory therefore assumes that an increased impossibility leads to a less magical effect.

The too-perfect theory is often applied to magical effects, but it contradicts recent scientific research that shows that participants' enjoyment of a magic performance is positively related to the perceived impossibility of the trick. In their study, Pailhès, Lee and Kuhn show that participants enjoyed a perfect performance more than an imperfect one (4). This means that every magician is called upon to work on the perfection of their tricks and to ensure a high degree of impossibility of explanation.

I have been involved with the art of magic since the age of 6 and have been performing magic for over 25 years. This experience, together with the points mentioned above, helps me to position myself successfully in the market, to look back on a large number of great performances and experiences and to continue to do my best in the future to enchant many more guests as a really good magician, to inspire my audience and to leave them with a moment of amazement. This is reflected in the large number of regular customers who keep asking me to perform and for whom I work on a regular basis. I have been working for the cruise line AIDAcruises for over 11 years, entertaining guests every year at dinner shows for restaurants and travelling the world for Robinson Clubs for over a decade.