Rehearsing Your Mistakes Book - Angel Simal

Description

About the book

Magicians are experts in producing memorable moments in their shows. In Rehearsing Your Mistakes, you will learn some of their secret techniques to achieve an outstanding presentation.

Forget about Murphy's Law, and take a step forward to create your own events.

Whether you are a professional performer or just want to improve your public speaking, this book is for you. You will learn some practical improvisation concepts that could save your life when something goes out of the script, you will discover a simple method to do a proper risk assessment during your rehearsal, and you will get to know a bunch of powerful secrets that will create great emotions in your audience.

In these pages, you will also discover a complete study on creativity, the fantastic muse that all great artists pursue.

Rehearsing Your Mistakes is about a creative process where imagination, technique and experience get together to come to the rescue of the magician in distress.

About the author

Ángel Simal is a professional magician from Spain with wide international experience. Original acts and powerful presentations are always enjoyed by the audience in his shows.

Simal is also the artistic director of a magic festival in Spain, “Castillo Mágico”, which has been running since 2012 in a beautiful medieval castle.

Rehearsing your Mistakes, first published in Spanish on 2018, has been widely praised by the magic community in Spain. Then, the author decided to translate the book into English so more magicians and performers could enjoy it. Rehearsing your Mistakes has been finally published in English in April 2021.

Norbert Ferré

The foreword is written by the star magician Norbert Ferré, Grand Prix FISM winner (2003) and awarded the Mandrake D’or by the Academy of Magic Arts (2002).

Book Chapters

Foreword by Norbert Ferré

Preface by the author

0- The Bicycle

1- The Mistake

2- Improvisation

3- Forecasting the Future

4- The Search for the Mistake

5- The Point of No Return

6- Creativity

7- Final thoughts

Acknowledgments

A quick summary by the author

- I start on chapter 1 by talking about failure and how magicians react to unexpected situations, how the audience perceives it and how we should learn from our mistakes.

- On chapter 2, I talk about the main tool that we can use to deal with it right away: Improvisation.

- Chapter 3 is about how to make a proper risk assessment during the rehearsal and perhaps minimize the likelihood of unexpected situations / mistakes. Then, I explain how to create contingency plans that will make us more confident for the show.

- Chapter 4 is about how we, wicked magicians, make use of artificial mistakes to win bonus points in our presentations to boost the magic climax and other intentions.

- Chapter 5 is about the ‘point of no return’ on its two versions: about taking actions in order not to get to the same situation ever again, and about when to recognize we are finally lost.

- Chapter 6 is about creativity. I think that dealing with mistakes is a creative process, so I wanted to include a chapter with my humble thoughts on creativity. I was greatly inspired by the studies of Howard Gardner on multiple intelligences.

- Chapter 7 is about recapping and my final thoughts and advises.

Quotes of Praise

"Angel Simal has done something unusual, which I found very interesting: he's written an entire work on how we can embrace our failures - both in our shows and in our thinking - and learn from them.

It's a worthy task and I found the advice stimulating and useful."

- Joshua Jay, world-class magician

"To mess up or not to mess up? That is the question. To mess up elegantly, to mess up deliberately, to mess up constantly, to mess up happily. Ángel Simal, thinker and magician’s lifeguard, tells us that mistakes are part of our lives. Hidden or at our sight, failure is always ready to bump into us. Not even the more prepared artists are safe!”

- Jaime Figueroa, comedy magician

“We’re constantly training to do things right, but what happens when something goes wrong? If you perform in front of a massive crowd, you’d better be ready for that. Ángel Simal’s essay will allow you to design strategies for facing your mistakes and make the most out of them.

An absolutely essential reading for those of us who work with the audience.”

Edama – stage illusions champion