Touch Triptych

Last Tuesday, I promised I’d show you what I consider to be a successful example of stringing multiple tricks together.

I don’t like to call this a “routine” because magicians have devalued that word to the point of meaninglessness. Just like they’ve done with “impromptu” and “EDC” or “experience.” (“I don’t want to just do tricks… I want to give people an experience!” they say. Great! Me too! I think. Then I watch them perform, and it’s just fucking tricks.)

Also, “routine” just suggests tricks that follow one after the other, rather than tricks that tell a single story.

Last Tuesday, I wrote:

Think in terms of story rather than “routine.”

You have a story you want to tell, and these tricks when put together are going to tell that story.

This set of three tricks is an example of such a story.

Last month, as part of the Christmas Spectacular, I released a new feature in the Jerx App that allows you to perform a PK Touches routine for one person. You can read all about that and how it works in this post. (That post will only be up a couple more weeks before it gets sucked into the instructions for the Jerx App.)

How do I make this one trick a story? A routine? Dare I say… an experience??

This is a trick about someone feeling you touch them when you’re not. Let’s build that out.

Let’s say my friend Olivia is visiting me. I’m telling her about a… skill or technique… that I learned when I was 19.

This skill is about touch, and experiencing touch… and well… I don’t want to say too much at this point.

I walk her through three moments.

First, I touch a pencil to her fingertip and she is able to feel my heartbeat through the pencil.

“Okay… good, good. For some people, even that doesn’t work. So that’s a good first step.”

The next phase is to try to get Olivia to feel my energy when I’m not touching her. (Not with my hand. Not with a pencil. Not with anything.)

She holds out her hand, and I rub my hands together and draw them down her arm to her fingertips. After a few false starts, she feels a definite ripple of energy down her armas my fingers pass. Great!

Finally, I have her stand facing away from me. She feels certain touches on her hand, but when I show her the video recording of what we just did, she realizes she was never touched. I only touched my own hand.

She keeps the video as a reminder of this experience.

You see how these moments all work together as a progression? First she “feels me,” but through another object. Then she “feels me” when I’m not touching her at all, but the feeling is only a general sensation. And finally she feels specific touches in a specific way when I’m not touching her. It’s a perfect build.

Method:

Part 1: Heartbeat (Juan Colas)
Part 2: A Loop
Part 3: PK Photo on the Jerx App.

Now, the truth is, I don’t do this one trick after another in a period of 10 minutes. I generally pace it out over a period of time. With part 1 happening at one interaction and the other parts happening at later interactions. I also like to include other little touch-based “experiments” in the mix. These are not tricks. Just other tests that help us get on the same vibration.

So the initial story of this “routine” is about the progression of us being able to feel each other without touching.

On top of that, I lay another story about why I ever learned this skill. In that story, I talk about my girlfriend during my sophomore year in college. How we met in October, fell for each other, and started dating at the end of November. And then we had just a few weeks to spend together before she was off for a semester abroad in Spain.

This is all 100% true.

We knew we could talk once a week on the phone and write letters… but we were definitely going to miss each other physically. Again all true.

Where my story veers from the truth is when I say that I started researching ways for us to “transmit” our touch over distance. So I could caress her cheek. Or hold her hand. Or… you know… do other stuff to her even though there were 4000 miles between us.

Now, this is absolutely a hyper-flirtatious premise for a trick. And so it’s not necessarily something you can bring out for everyone. The unspoken (or perhaps spoken) ramification of going through this process with someone is that, seemingly, with maybe some more practice, you two could be getting each other off remotely if you were so inclined.

Obviously, you don’t need to imply that aspect of it. Feeling touched without being touched is already an intimate enough experience without taking it to that level.

As a general structure, this manner of tying tricks together works very well. Take a very strong trick and then take a couple of other tricks that are different methodologically, but feel like early predecessors to the finale trick. Doing these tricks over the course of an evening, or the course of a few interactions, is going to have a very natural flow to it. And it will firmly implant the premise of that final trick with the spectator for much longer than if you were to just perform that trick in isolation.