Salutations, Definitions, Clarifications

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Greetings and salutations, Interwebs!  My name is Sasha Mereu and I bid you a fond welcome to my humble corner of the interlinked collective sum of computers on our planet that we call the Internet.  I will be posting here on occasion, but wanted to cover a few things with this, my inaugural communique.  I am not planning on making either this entry or subsequent entries chronologically-dependent, so feel free to skip around and get a glimpse of what it looks like in my brain.

First off, what is it that I do exactly?  I am both a director and a performer, across several disciplines in the performing arts.  I'll let you read my bio page for specifics, but in terms of this blog post, let's discuss what I could be for you.  I am assuming that you are a performer: a magician, an actor, a singer, a dancer, a musician, a comedian, or perhaps a spoken word artist or public speaker.  You get in front of audiences and do things that entertain them, enlighten them, mystify them, or otherwise transport them temporarily outside of their day-to-day lives.  Whether you do this for a living or as a hobby, my bet is that you love what you do.  And my other bet is that you have not had the opportunity to sit down with someone who can offer an outside perspective on your work, but a perspective that is well-informed and cognizant of the constituent parts that make up your act, whatever it may be.  When we first start out, we performers, by necessity, wear all the hats and make everything happen ourselves.  We conceptualize our routines.  We self-promote and book gigs.  We make or choose our costumes and make up.  And we are the writers, the choreographers, the publicists, and the producers.  And the consequence of being in charge of all these jobs is a double-edged sword - we create something that is very special to us, but we also are so close to our product that it is difficult to see it from the eyes of our would-be audiences.  So this is where I come into the equation.  I want to see your work.  I want to experience what makes you unique as an artist/performer, and then I want to offer some suggestions on how to make your work more focused, more accessible to your audiences, and more memorable and meaningful.  Sometimes it is as simple as adding silence in the right place or altering a gesture, and other times routines need a complete overhaul either because they're dated or have become stale or just haven't had the attention to detail paid to them that is required to move that piece from good to great.  No matter what the solutions end up being, I want to help make you the best that you can be... and I want to have fun while doing it.

Secondly, it states briefly in my bio that I am writing a book on magic assisting.  This is true.  I will most definitely be using this blog as a platform to premiere some sample chapters and get some feedback, but wanted to say that the book is much more comprehensive than its description.  This will be a manual for new assistants to give them some idea of what is expected of them in the magic world, but it will also function as a tool for lead magicians who perform on stage or in the parlour on how to best utilize their resources.  I am really excited to get this thing finished and into the hands of my magical compatriots, because in the grand scheme of things, this is all about making amazing art; it's about creating performances, no matter what the discipline, that resonate with people and create lasting memories.  Maya Angelou famously said, "At the end of the day people won't remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel."  Let's make them feel alive!

Lastly for this post, I wanted to call attention to the fact that while I specialize in working with magicians, so many of the techniques that create those moments of pure magic, whether one is conjuring or not, are the same across the performing arts.  I have directed and acted in many full length plays, and one-acts, and musicals.  I have played many concerts in numerous genres, and I have danced, and sang, and performed mime and made balloon animals and read aloud and performed marriages and MC'ed wedding receptions and and and... I apologize for abandoning the Oxford comma there, but you get the idea.  All of those things are performances and they all rely on the same fundamentals of live entertainment.  The phrase "Jack of All Trades, Master of None" has followed me for my whole career and I embrace that (most especially when one includes the oft-forgotten ending to that quote - "... but better than master of only one."  Nearly everything about the performing arts is interconnected; the medium doesn't matter when it comes down to a conceptual level.  Creativity is merely the ability to see connections where others don't and my motto for my work is that excellence is in the details.  I am so pleased that you are reading these words.  I look forward to working with you!

-S