This evening’s meeting was attended by 24 members and 6 guests. It was held in Room 1 of Drama Center in the National Library building. The theme was Kids’ Magic and was hosted by Ian Tan and assisted by Tommy Kian. The evening featured 4 specialist in kids’ magic, 2 of whom were invited performers, and 2 from our members.
The first program was the Induction Ceremony where a copy of our Ring 115 constitutions and a wooden magic wand were given to Kai Emmanuel Kuah and Tedric Peh.
The first of the invited guest performers was Francis Ang. He began by presenting his promo videos on his kids’ birthday magic shows. Originally a close-up performer, Francis adapts many of his close-up tricks for children. He crafts his effects according to the demographics of his children audience. As an example, he performed a coin flurry routine suitable for kids. Unlike the typical kids’ magician, he prefers to wear whatever he feels comfortable in (including black attire) and still manages to keep the children entertained with his sleight of hand magic.
Tommy Kian is our member and he specialises in kids’ magic. He emphasised the importance of having a structure (beginning, middle and ending) for a kid’s magic show. Treating children in the audience as his little siblings, he notes that smiling sets the right mood. He always includes some tricks for the adults because the parents of the kids will be in the shows. He recommends securing good reviews from clients after each performance as they help enhance his standing among event organisers and provide free publicity. To round off his sharing, he presented a selected card in animal trap effect suitable for children.
Wee Kian Meng aka Mr Bottle is a kids’ magician and is also our member. He draws laughter with his ‘magician in trouble’ show. He demonstrated this by performing McCombical Prediction using cards depicting various shapes slanted for children. He added it was important to “choose” the right audience as participants and would always compliment the child for a successful trick.
Derrick Ho aka Mr Egg was the second guest kids’ magician. He performed Ton Onosaka’s “Bananapple” trick and demonstrated how he would inject humour in his routine and engage the children by varying his tone, pitch and speed of performance.
In-between introducing each of these 4 performers, Ian Tan, himself a kids’ performer, provided interesting strategies for performing a successful kids’ magic show.
The 4 kids’ magicians then came together as a panel to take on audience questions about handling children’s shows. It was facilitated by Ian Tan. Some takeaways included setting ground rules, maintaining a firm grip (literally) on a child’s arm while smiling, varying reaction according to the child’s level of mischievousness, performing magic trick to impress even the heckler, treating them with love and not embarrassing them, empowering them, choosing the audience and making the journey fun including when mentalism is performed.
After a short interval, James Pang demonstrated a series of tricks for children. He blew bubbles into the air, caught one and transformed it into a lollipop and made a pen penetrate a long balloon. In transposition, he made a set of “traffic light” balls in red-yellow-green order change into yellow-green-red order. Finally, he removed the red ball, vanished it under a scarf and made it reappear together with the rest of the traffic lights.
Ng Kah King aka Uncle King performed the pom-pom stick trick for his children audience, to amaze them with how the unconnected strings when pulled could still move the pom-poms along or against gravity.
John Teo rounded off the evening’s performance. Presenting a headless Lego-type figurine, he placed a randomly selected superhero’s head on it and it turned out to be Captain America’s. When the figurine was turned around, it was coincidentally bearing a shield, just as what Captain America would use. With a quick flick of his finger, the figurine’s costume also instantly changed into Captain America’s. Next, he presented a set of Pokkemon cards. He then transformed each of them into energy cards. It is a “Wild Card” effect adopted for children using the Pokkemon cards.
This was followed by a lucky draw where 5 lucky members won something special, and the evening concluded with mingling and fellowship for magicians.
