KEH 132: How To Shine So That Even The Adults Will Love You

How To Shine So That Even The Adults Will Love You


Download Your Free Resource: Make Your Performances More Fantastic with the Perfect Tracks

Welcome to Season 7 chapter 132 of the Kids Entertainer Podcast! Danny is back again as co-host on this episode today. Today we talked about how to shine while performing so that even the adults will love you.

Here are some of the important notes from this episode:

  • How to practice = Skills. How to rehearse = Routines
  • Tools like Mirror vs Camera/video and the Director/Outside eye
  • Confidence comes from preparation; Smiling with your eyes, being genuine, practice & playing
  • Eyes are windows to the soul
  • Keep your windows clean & fresh technique
  • The eyes wide open technique
  • Including the adults – Perform for everyone in the room principle
  • Connect with the kids AND adults by asking them to help
  • Interact with kids improvise on their answers to enchant the adults.
  • Be Brilliant at what you do – be spectacular and be different!


Resources mentioned in this episode:

Now it’s your turn!
What did you think of this episode? Please share your comments below. Thanks for listening!


Download Your Free Resource: Make Your Performances More Fantastic with the Perfect Tracks

Transcript:

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Voice Over:

Welcome to the Kids Entertainer Podcast, the world’s leading podcast for children’s and family entertainers, and here to help you in your journey of spreading smiles and joy, your host, Zivi Kiv.

Zivi:

Hello, Whats up? And let me welcome my cohost, Dennis. Hello, Danny.

Danny:

Hi. Hi, everybody. Welcome. It’s great to be back for episode two.

Ziv:

Yes. Welcome back. You guys listening to this welcome Danny here today in episode number seven, season number seven, we are talking about performances. Danny we talked about last week about this idea about how that makes sense to do like now less show. And one of those things was to get better in your performances, but how can you get better in performing if you can perform? Is that even possible?

Danny:

Yes. Yes, it is totally possible. Everything’s possible. You just have to put your mind to it as you can. Very well known. So what we can do is rehearse practice, create new things, practice them, and I’m going to tell you how you can do that. And what is the difference between practicing and rehearsing? What do you think what’s the difference between practicing and rehearsing?

Ziv:

I think, yeah, I think that when you’re practicing, you might be practicing also just the skill or just like the part of the thing. When you think it’s a scripted routine that is cut out more complete. That’s how I will say,

Danny:

But that’s exactly what I was going to say. You took the words right out

Ziv:

Of my mouth. So

Danny:

Practicing practicing is like repeating a skill. So in magic you do endless coin rolls or card shuffles or whatever you’re going to do. Balloon twisting. It’s the same thing. You’re training your body to memorize sequences. Whereas in re when you’re rehearsing, your you’ve worked on your skills and now you’re putting them into a routine with gags, with fun, with play with, I mean, obviously you can’t practice audience interaction with nobody in the room, but you kind of know what kids are going to do anyway, so you can imagine responses. Yeah. So that is the difference.

Ziv:

And of course that would be a skill that you will later on in the future needs to work on. But at the very least you will have all the other skills if you practice and rehearse, but it will allow you to shine when you will perform later on in a way that even dogs will love watching you.

And you’ve been studying, you’ve been studying for many years. You started this professionally by studying how to perform as sick, as performance as a clown. And that was not something like a three day course or workshop, isn’t it?

Danny:

No, no. I’ve, I’ve been to circus school. I’ve been for quite some time. And then I went to theater school in Brussels where I learned to Lowcock method. If that means anything to anybody, it’s a way of physical theater. And, and then I went into a very small circus because it’s summer and I’m not performing. I’ve been thinking, oh yeah, I used to go out and perform in circuses and have fun with people in the sun. But obviously I can’t do that so much at the moment. So I’ve been remembering, oh yeah. I remember putting up a circus tent in the middle of nowhere and things like that.

Danny:

And all these skills are coming back to me.

Ziv:

Yeah. And that’s actually, if you look back into like before you got into school and in the middle and at the end you got to better.

Danny:

Yes. Yes. It’s really important to remember that all these small moments of practicing, of rehearsing, of performing, it builds up your skills bank. You’re putting your depositing experience in your skills bank and your experience bank. And then in times like this in pandemic times, when you go, ah, I feel a bit useless. I can’t perform or whatever you’re feeling, you can’t, you can go, okay, well, I’ve done this and I’ve done that. Oh yeah. I forgot about that one. So it’s important to remember what you have done, how far you have come already. Even if you’re a complete beginner, you have other experiences that you can bring in to performing.

Danny:

I don’t know what they are, but it’s important to think about these things and think positively so that we can go forward and perform either virtually now or in the future, again, back in reality in real life.

Zivi:

So there’s a way for you to practice and there was a way for you to be healthy. And we’ll talk about this today. Yes.

Danny:

Why do you need to practice a Zivi? Well, I know you don’t practice because you’re now doing podcasts and everything, but why actually, Zivi:
As we speak, I’m like practicing a few minutes through with the cards. So like it’s not entirely accurate. I do, I do try to practice some of my skills and I cherish those moments when I was performing full time with an audience. I think that you want to be there present. You want to be present when you’re performing, you want to not focus about what are you doing next?

What’s the next routine. Where’s the metrics that you won’t be calm and pleasant and like be yourself. That’s the most important thing.

Dannny:

Absolutely. So the most important thing is when you’re performing is the audience. They don’t want to see you. Was it this handle that hand, which way do I do that? Or I can’t remember. Now, hang on. That’s all needs to be practiced in your skills, rehearsal, session skills, practice session, not rehearsal. Sorry. That makes sense. And the reason you need to practice your skills is so that you keep them up. As we said, last week, you need to practice your skills so that when you go back to performing or when you do virtual shows that at your fingertips, literally, if you’re a magician, you need everything at your fingertips. You need to know if you haven’t performed your show for several months and you go back to it, you forget all the little nuances and the little side jokes you make and all the little details that make the show really rich and important for the audience.

Danny:

So you need to keep your skills up as a first thing, and then you can rehearse your routines and then you can rehearse your show.

Ziv:

Yeah. And I know it might be fascinating for some to hear this. And like, if they didn’t practice for a while and guys, if you’re listening to this, like this is not about, there’s no plain and no shame. This is all about us. Just sharing with you, ideas of what can help you move along and be better because they say in the book, atomic habits, they say like, you’re either getting better in 1% every day, or you’re getting both you usually, if you’re not practicing those skills, you’re slowly getting worse. I don’t know what shuffling whatever, but you can get better at 1% is hard to identify. But if you constantly do it after a year that you’d accumulate into like a lot.

Ziv:

So you will be getting better way faster than a year, but you do have potentially a good storm before you, you can go back to normal. If you want to say it again, you need your skills to be improving and not going back to not being able to do stuff.

Danny:

Yeah. I’ve heard that when you’re learning a new musical instrument, if you practice just 10 minutes a day, you will get better. And it’s much better than doing, oh, I’m going to practice once a week and you do three hours and your fingers are broken because your muscles aren’t building up. So whatever your skill, you’re practicing magic, juggling balloons, puppetry. It doesn’t matter. If you just do 10 minutes, a day of pure concentrated, focused practice, you will, you will. That’s 70 minutes a week. That’s a lot in the, in, in a month, in a year,

Ziv:

You know, what does that reminds me of an online course that we have in the kids that I know, I know it’s crazy, but Colin diamond has a process called edit ventriloquism routine to your show in 70 days. And he talks about how learning, how to do ventriloquism. You know, that skill. You can talk without moving your lips, which I just demonstrated. It sounded a bit different.

Danny:

It’s great for podcasts with masks.

Ziv:

It’s easier with the mask on because then the people don’t even see your lips in the course only talks about how he doesn’t want you to practice every day for 30 minutes. Why? Because he doesn’t want you to get to the point where you have had it. You’ve had enough. You’ve had enough for today. He want you to always want more. So you practice 10 minutes a day. Practicing for, for a little bit of time is even better for you.

Danny:

So that’s practicing. So it’s really important that you go okay. Today. I want to practice my juggling, my card, shuffling my sponge ball, disappearing and reappearing, whatever you want to it doesn’t matter. Ventriloquism is a great example. And then you, after a few days of this or a couple of weeks, or a couple of months, when you’re comfortable, can you look away and not do it? If you video yourself and you’re staring at the, at the camera, can you do it without looking? That’s a little test for you. And then once you’ve gone on to that, how are you going to put it into a routine? So then you’re moving into the rehearsing section and you’re, you’re coming up with a string of skills or a string of gags or a string of middle magic moments that make a whole routine.

Ziv:

Danny, I have a question for you as you get to see a lot of performers from all over the world

Danny:

I do.

Ziv:

And from different types of performing like magic magic, or what would you prefer?

An entertainer have like one to three skills that he’s really good at like 10 skills that he can demonstrate personally.

Danny:

I think it’s great to have three amazing skills. And one of those skills it’s performing and stage presence. I mean, you might not working, but you’re working on a stage now, but you still need to be engaged with your audience so that they are with you engage themselves and you need character and you need it doesn’t matter if you’re funny or not, but you need to be engaging. Whether you’re storytelling, whether you’re doing bubbles, whether you’re doing unit cycling or in fact magic, you need to be able to connect with your audience. That is the most important thing.

Ziv:

That’s a pretty good directory, but then talking about those other skills that javelin. So I can give you a 10 list of 10 different skills that you can use in show use, but I’m twisting, you can use, you can use magic cleaving you, I can, you the, at least of those things, but what do you do? What you would like to see in a shell that skillful presentation of 1, 2, 3 of these, or just a collection of a variety of skills. Okay.

Danny:

I’m going to give you another directory answer because actually it doesn’t matter about the scale. It doesn’t matter. You have standup comedians that have nothing. They’re just talking,

Ziv:

Play the bunch, the bento. Yeah.

Danny:

You can play the banjo. You can, you can whistle. You look at these huge talent shows like America’s got talent or Britain’s got talent, or Australia’s got talent. There are lots of talent shows on TV. Now the things that the judges like are something different, something they haven’t seen before, something that they’ve seen before or presented in a different way. So it’s fine to do the same thing and do it your way. But maybe your character is different. Maybe they haven’t seen a crazy wacky character or maybe they haven’t seen somebody do it hanging upside down, but it’s still a spongeable routine, for example. So I think what, I’m sorry to be directory. I don’t care what your skill is, how you present it.

Ziv:

Actually, I think a is, is the better answer because it does give hope to everyone. Yeah. So you can do whatever you want. You can walk on one skill and get really good at it or 10 of these. And it wouldn’t matter if you’re not going to put in the work on getting better at performing or getting better at stage craft and getting better at audience engagement. And you can do this as well, even these days. How can, how is that even possible?

Danny:

So you need to, I mean, we’re going to cover this in another episode, I believe, but I will just touch on it now just because we’re here now and talking about it. So I think if you take one, so I’m a balloon performer. I specialize in balloons. So I tell stories with balloons. I do magic with balloons. I juggle balloons and I’ve specialized in balloons. So I’m really very good at balloon stuff now. But for example, if you’re a magician and you go, okay, I really like card magic. Okay. How small can you make the cards? How huge can you make the cards for kids? Do they really, are they really, really interested in clubs, spades, diamonds hearts? Or can you make it about colors? And you blend two color cards together, or it’s funny pictures or characters on cards. So there’s many things. You take one topic and you can play with it. And playing is really important to generate material. So when you’re practicing your skill, you can play. Okay. So I’m going to play with cards, how you can buy these much bigger cards. Now, what happens if I play with shuffling huge cards? I mean, is it funny? How awkward can I make it? So there are many things you can do or I’m going to make out of thin cardboard just to test it.

Danny:

Doesn’t have to cost you anything. You to make some tiny cards and color them, different colors just to play around with it. How tiny can they be? How can I shuffle a pack of maybe 30 little tiny cards and see what happens? And maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. But when you go back to the normal cards, you’ll be really much better because you’ve played with, with different sized things, different objects within that sphere, within that realm. And what about like the actual skills of like stagecraft independently keyboard? It’s harder to practice this skill, isn’t it? It is. But there is a thing called cameras. And if you’re doing virtual shows, this is really easy to practice. And because you can practice this, practice it, record yourself and watch it. Like you were an audience member and go, oh yeah, I’m not doing this. I’m not actually looking at the camera.

I’m not, my eyes are closed half the time. I keep looking down when I’m shuffling cards. So you can video yourself. And I think it’s probably one of my three ways of rehearsing and practicing. So like, I’m going to go into that now. Ziv:
Nope, please. I’m actually wondering what are the three ways?

Danny:

So the three ways are once you’ve done your skills and it’s great to video yourself or take pictures, use them on social media use, Hey, I’m practicing my 75 cards shuffle today. Whatever you’re going to do. I don’t, it doesn’t matter. I’m using cards as an example, but it doesn’t matter. And you can just show us a post to put out to your social media rehearsing. I, some people like to rehearse in mirrors. I don’t really like that because you are looking at yourself in the mirror. You’re not focusing on what you’re doing.

So I prefer a camera. We all have them on our phones now on our laptops, computers, whatever you’re using. So why not just use your video camera, film, yourself, perform for the camera. That’s your audience. And then stop and watch it again with audience as an audience member and go, okay, what can I do better? What did I really like? What was really good? So that’s, that’s the second method. And the best method is to get an outside di, a director who has extra knowledge and extra brain to help you with ideas and to suggest things and be a coach, my three techniques.

Zivi:

That’s all stuff that you can actually do today. And some of these are totally free. Like we all have a phone. If you’re listening to this and you don’t have a phone, then it valleys. You have internet connection. So you’re, you’re really doing okay, get a phone and put it in a mode and then you have a phone. And, but yeah, like it’s not going to cost you anything to do that, to just feel Julian meta data used to be hosting this podcast in the past nowadays, he teaches people how to use a video camera on their phone in a way that allows them to create content and videos for businesses. One of his tips is to take a coffee cup, like just a one-time use coffee cup. And when you put it upside down, you can cut the sleeves on the back side of it for your fault. So you can create the stand for your phone, wherever you are in a matter of a minute. It’s a little bit a DIY crafty thing, but you can save the 20 bucks that it costs to have a tripod. And you can practice. You can just find a book to put your phone on, but you can easily put your phone, video yourself, practice and watch it.

And it gets better.

Danny:

I like that. Tip a lot about the upside down cup pod on a tripod. It’s a cup pod. I’ve just renamed it. But I think coffee. No, no, I don’t have coffee in it while you turn upside down. That’s ridiculous.

Ziv:

So what with athlete ways and the personally I chose when I was working on getting my show better, I was, I decided to use the extra poach and I’ve been looking into different directors and decided to work with that works over zoom, because I like the idea of sending my videos to someone. He watches that he looks at it. We talk about the show and that way we can, I can get my show better. I can get my stage craft better. And I don’t need someone to come over and see me perform, which in these days is even harder just to schedule it. So you don’t have to wait for an opportunity. You can, I guess the electing directors, even that yes, Danny:
If you know anybody.

Ziv:

Actually, I wanted to ask, if you want to know the details of the guy who helped you really good, he named himself, Danny, the idiot. Yeah. That was you, Danny. Yeah.

Danny:

That’s what I do. And I’ve been doing it for a couple of few years now. Yeah. And quite a few. Yeah. And I’ve worked with lots and lots of people all around the world and it’s really, I really love doing it. I really love helping people, making their shows better, improving what they do, giving them crazy ideas that I get from watching them. It’s a very bespoke personal thing. So I’m helping somebody now. He, he gave me his video yesterday. He said, can you look at this? When you look at that?

And that’s what I’m doing, I will be continuing later today and doing that with him. Yeah.

Ziv:

So, so you can choose to use the meal or use the COVID hour video. Or you can or not say die. Like if you have an entertainer that lives nearby and you’re not sure you can do that. We have a KEA member from Austria who has a son who is an actor. And he performs every new routine with him for like 40 times. And we’ll do the entire routine and you will get critiqued every time. Notice this one that is also possible. And okay, you’ll just need to feel confident that you are doing that. And speaking of confidence, that’s another. Yeah.

Danny:

I just want to mention one thing about using somebody else. It might be an outside di that’s your friend. You need to make sure that you trust them, that you know that they are knowledgeable in the area that you’re working in, like an actor yet an actor knows about performing. He might not know about magic, but he can work on everything else on stagecraft with you, whereas your wife or your neighbor or your kids or whatever, they will laugh when they, when it’s funny. But they might not be able to give you critical feedback, which is what you need. You don’t need somebody gushing. Oh, that was lovely. I really love that. What did which bit did you like everything? I like, that’s no good. You need somebody to go, ah, you know, that bit didn’t quite work or you need to switch those two bits around or whatever it is you need to trust them.

Ziv:

Yeah. Yeah. I understand. I understand that. That’s a big, big difference. So let’s, let’s continue with moving along to complete confidence. Why is that important?

Dani:

When you’re confident people trust you? If you’re a bit nervous and we’re all nervous, I get nervous every time I perform, even though I’m very experienced, I have to have those nerves, nerves.

I mean, you care, you care about your audience. You care about your performance. You want to give your customers, your clients, your audience, the best show possible. So you need to be prepared. The key to confidence is preparation. And you do that with practicing your skills and rehearsing your routines, as we’ve already talked about and being knowledgeable about your business. So now in the pandemic, you need to know your local rules. You need to know about protective equipment. You need to know about social distancing, all those things you can relate to your clients to give them confidence in booking you, even before you stop performing.

Ziv:

I think that one of the things that’s helped me personally with confidence is that I personally learn every single day just before being this recording. I had a time in my, in my schedule. I work with a very sleek schedule because I do like 50 different coaching sessions a week. And that requires me to be very hands-on on my schedule, but I had 20 minutes available. So I opened up an online course and I started studying every day, constantly getting new ideas of what I want to do and how to be better at whatever, in my case, marketing and coaching and business, which I’m passionate about. And in the Kid’s Entertainer Academy’s case, what is does is it helps to build confidence around kids at the thing of all sorts. So pop-ups, we have a course for that. So we have multiple courses for that magic, definitely multiple courses and so on. So it helps you by constantly looking into other lectures, finding out what other people are talking about, like the superstars the most experienced entertainer that’s out there, the walkers, they come and lecture in KEA and the tell you what works for them.

And by watching that and identifying what you can do better and doing it better and practicing it all that together, it builds your confidence.

Danny:

That is right. And I, there is a huge amount of resources in KEA and BAC, Kids Entertainers Academy, and balloon artists college. But also there is a YouTube, there is Vimeo. You can go online. Google is your friend and you can, there’s a cabaret demand, which is a French variety show. It’s really great. I’ll put it in the notes afterwards. Don’t worry.

Ziv:

Yeah. Yes, yes. I want to see it.

Danny:

And they have world-class variety acts performing from Russia or from all around the world. And they go and they do, they’re like 10 minute act, 12 minutes may be, and some are amazing. And there’s a lot of magic. There’s a lot of circus stuff. There’s a lot of variety. So if you want to watch experts and go, oh, I really liked that. How could, how could I do that for kids in my show is, is a question I often ask when I’m watching these things. I mentioned, America’s got talent, Britain’s got talent. I watched those because I want to see who is putting themselves on this massive platform, this world wide platform and getting these commercial experts. Some of them don’t know anything about magic, but they, they know how to critique. They know how to comment. They know what they like. And sometimes they argue and, but what do these people put out? And if they get through, they have to build their act up. They have to have another three minutes. That is amazing and so on

Ziv:

And that’s I, and do you know what, sometimes when I started to do that, when I, when I was going up is performer. I got overwhelmed by looking at other people that are better than me. And they got to feel jealous and you need to look into yourself for how much exposure you give to like two different levels. And sometimes watching performers are just three steps ahead of you is easier to digest. But here’s one thing, additional question I would ask myself when I would watch the experts and the masters I will ask, well, how can you adapt this to a kids’ show? I would ask herself what version of this could you do? Meaning which might be a little bit T-cell on the skill level. It might not have all of these amazing manipulations, but what would be exfoliation of the same story, the same effects, the same emotion that people feel when they see them. Cause you can see take from watching this form on YouTube.

Danny:

Yes. I want to add something to that because as you were talking, it reminded me of something that I do when I’ve been creating shows and routines. So I have, what is the, I call it the Cirque du Soleil show, the high value production, anything. And I highly recommend watching the select shows. They are on YouTube now for free. They were amazing. And you look at the production value. There’s a couple of videos that go into how they’ve made the shows over three, six months a year. So that’s really interesting in itself, but what is my Cirque de Solei show? Okay. I haven’t got the resources or the money. I’m only doing a solo performance, so it’s not going to be the same. What, what if money were no limits? And then the opposite way is, okay, what’s my budget. What’s my budget show. What can I carry on my person? I don’t want an architect truck, a truck of stuff to carry around. So what is the minimum? And then I also have another one because I used to watch cheque cartoons. They’re really surreal, weird animations where heads are coming in and out and, and things are coming out of mouths. And I ask myself, what is the surreal version of that routine or show? How far can I push it into wackiness craziness? And so you have those high amounts of money and value, production values. You have nothing. And then you have surreal illness. And then, okay. So what’s my version out of those three, somewhere in between. That’s my top tip for today, guys.

Zivi:

That’s the free, thank you for listening. So let’s talk a little bit about smiling. Why is that important?

Danny:

Well, it’s even more important to be very professional with your smiling because when we go out now we have masks, masks covering our smiles. So there is a saying, eyes are the windows to the soul. When, when everybody talks about eyes, that, and it’s the phrase they use because it’s true.

And the trick nowadays is to keep your windows clean and fresh. So you need to make sure that you’re sleeping well, Devi that’s to you and everybody else. You need to make sure you’re healthy because you can tell in your eyes. And the second thing you need to know about eyes with smiling is you need to actually be genuine with your smiling. There’s no point trying to have a false smile it’s they did experiment scientifically with people. It’s really important that you are genuinely smiling. Okay? And you smile with your eyes. So when you’re practicing, you can just take your camera. As we’ve talked about, you can smile at yourself, smile at yourself. Is it, am I just smiling and moving my mouth in the right directions? Or am I genuinely pleased to see what I’m looking at in the mirror or in the camera or imagining what’s in the camera, those kids down that camera, that’s what you need to connect with.

Danny:

And that’s the way you connect with them is by smiling genuinely. And you’re really happy to be performing because you probably are. You really happy to be performing for real people. At the other end, either in front of you in life situation or in a virtual situation.

Ziv:

Might not be something that people think like, ah, we are serious, but this is very serious. And I, I joined your seriousness because I’ve been doing that for me personally, I use the shower as an opportunity to practice different smiles and different facial expressions because we actually have set the, the meal exactly the right height for me to do that. And that is something that also Uri Weiss who teach us clowning in the kids that are doing the academy. He talks about how he practiced some movement and some facial expressions that he uses constantly. It gets you to the actions.

ZiviL

Of course, that includes our society. You can do that and you need to do that. You need to do it because those muscles on your face, every single one of them can become more accurate in the way that you move your face. And you can see it. Like we’re both moving our eyebrows in all sorts of ways. And you can do the wave and I’m doing the pushups things that you can hack this on.

Danny:

If you, again, it’s another thing to practice. You don’t have to set aside whole days for this it’s moments in the day. Even when you’re going into your car to drive to school or shopping or whatever stores, you can look in the mirror and give yourself a little eyebrow wave or a little smile. But here I’m going to give another cracking performance tip for our listeners today.

Ziv:

I’m listening.

Danny:

Good, good. So here’s a technique because some people, when they smile their eyes, get the chicks go up and their eyes go smaller. And that’s exactly what you don’t want to happen. So what you need to do, here’s my tip. You need to open your wise eyes, open your eyes even wider. Yeah. So it’s not like with a smile. I mean, you need to be careful. Yeah. You don’t need to. I’m looking at Zoe now it’s a bit scary, but you need to practice that and go, am I scary? Or am I actually smiling genuinely? And it’s a little technique just to open your eyelids, upwards and downwards, do the right ones the right way. And, and it helps open your eyes a little more so that people can see your eyes because that is they’re the windows to your soul.

Ziv:

It’s almost, it feels like almost like your eyes are bleeding. You can like open them up a bit.

Danny:

It is exactly like you’re taking instead of your lungs, you’re taking a deep breath in and opening your eyes eyelids. Yeah. So that is my top tip. And I’ve seen lots of performers or people in general online, offline, just really not thinking about that eyes because that’s how we look into people’s eyes. We want to see if they’re genuine. If the, if it’s actually what they mean. So it’s really important that you practice along with your skills and your routines. You practice your eye contact, making contact through eye contact. Ziv:
Your eyes protects with the audience is I find the eyes to be an amazing tool for talking without one with your audience. And what they mean by that is that the eyes can ask for permission, the eyes can look for validation and we all want to be laughed as performance. That’s like a basic on stage because you want the audience to love you. That’s, that’s a really fundamental piece of understanding. Why are you there? It’s either because you want the audience to love you, or you want them to feel something with you, right? And that’s why you learn not just a TV. You you, you can constantly look at other people’s eye and see if they gave you permission to move on to another, that moment. When you look into someone’s eyes and you ask for permission and you post, if you do that with multiple people in the audience, that’s something that makes you feel the audience makes you feel like the audience is in coaching. And when do that, everything is funnier as well.

Danny:

BY whole heartedly agree with you, Zivi. And the thing about using your eyes really well. When you’re in a rail show in a, in real life, you can tell who is not paying attention. Who’s getting distracted or bored. You can look at the adults are they’re on the phone. Now I need to up my game, you can see who are enjoying, which kids are enjoying it and which, which kids really want to join in and help you. And they may be too keen, but you can tell that by looking directly in your audience’s eyes, the same as they will be looking in your eyes. So I think it’s a really important technique is to improving your eye usage and contact and being able to use your, do that technique of widening your eyes and being really present with your eyes, because you can go through teams, especially if you’ve done them a lot and you, and you’re just doing the routine, you know, the routine backwards, but really you need to be present with your eyes.

Zivi:

And when people are learning how to Jacko, they know they will talk some bots before they can really master when you’re practicing your smiles and your eyes.

And maybe even with a mask called without a mask, all of that and practicing the movement of your eyebrows on those, my whole muscles in your face. And you might feel like an idiot. You might not feel like you might talk the ball, but that’s okay. That’s just the process. The process of getting better is do you pick up the pole and do it again? And so don’t worry about it. At some point, you will notice that your smile is wider. You will notice that your eyes are open, your soul is showing up. And that takes time. That takes practice and it’s worth it, especially because when you’re entertaining kids, you’re not entertaining the kids.

Danny:

No, you’re entertaining everybody in the room. That’s my, that’s my kind of thing. But before I get into that, I just want to mention, because he reminded me when you do drop, if you’re just practicing, you’re juggling. What do you do? Do you look at the ball? How many ways? It’s really important, because as a juggler even when you get really, really good, inevitably you will drop. So what do you do when you’re practicing? How many ways can you pick up the ball again? Or how many ways can you react to a ball dropping? And you might just leave it there and carry on juggling two, two balls and go, I, that one’s and react to it in a, in your character’s way, whatever that is. So you can practice those responses as well. If you’re shuffling cards and one flies away, I didn’t practice different lines. I didn’t like that one anyway, was that your chosen card, but whatever, whatever it is, and you have these responses off in your head because you, every time you practice your 10 minutes every day, you’re going, oh, I dropped again three times a day or whatever, but I have three new lines in my head original to me because I just thought of them.

Ziv:

And that’s like taking lemons and making them into lemonade. That’s something you can do every single day.

Danny:

Yeah. So building, building into your skills is reactions to when you, when things go wrong is really important as well. And things because in live shows in virtual shows things go wrong. It’s how you cope with it. Yeah. But now you asked about including adults.

Ziv:

It’s very important for me because honestly, on the business level, when he goes back to normal and we managed to perform for those kids and adults, or even now when people are performing through zoom and there’s actually a course on that, but there is a, the dogs that don’t need the room and if got nothing to attain, they’re not going to talk about you with other people. And then they will book you as well. So you really want that also be entertainment, also, not just from a performance standpoint, which is for a business standpoint because adults carry credit cards. So what can we do to entertain the adults?

Danny:

My policy from very early on in my career has been to perform for everybody in the room. So whether they’re kids, whether they’re adults, whether they’re technical stage, hands, stage technicians, and theaters, or the caretaker in a village hall that we have in England, it doesn’t matter. I’m performing for everybody staring at me because that’s the way I do it. And so you can have different levels of gags. You can have gods gags for kids, physical stuff. You can have more word play with adults and older children, but the best way through practice through rehearsal, through having a director or outside die is to breathe. Be brilliant at what you do, be different. So people are going, oh, well, I haven’t seen that yet. Hang on a minute. Climbing inside a balloon has been, has been done a lot and people know it, but having it done in front of their eyes, people get out cameras.

Danny:

Even if the adults don’t like anything else in my show, which they do, but even if they’ve been distracted or whatever, or preparing the food or whatever at the end, they will come out and take photos and video of me climbing inside a giant balloon because it’s spectacular. You need your endings to be spectacular.

Ziv:

Wow. Oh, there’s so many things here that you just mentioned that are super important. Absolutely. I think guys that it’s the listening to podcasts. You can really listen to this and get inspired again. I want to add something to this. There’s something about being present at the moment and doing something that is specifically for your audience that day at this time, which creates a magnetic power field with adults. So when you ask a question to a kid and they answer and you continue the dialogue with them, and maybe in a funny way, you argue with them or something like that respectfully funny way, like in the last year I managed to do a social distancing show, a few weeks back.

And the one of the kids decided to pull, be clown. And I, I present myself as a magician and I was arguing with him about how I’m not totally cloud, but I wanted to make it more personal and more in the moment. So I started to talk about how the fact that I come from downtown doesn’t mean I’m a clown. The fact that I, in the cloud street named clownish in clown town, doesn’t make me clown, kid. I’m talking to you and really enjoy that bit. But suddenly I was shocked actually, because I was just having fun. But the thoughts was suddenly totally with the show. They were laughing. They were enjoying themselves. And the kids of course will, or shouting back at me to tell me, no, you are in clown and they don’t understand what it even means for you or something like that. Five-Year-Old steel. What does this even mean? Cloud CD doesn’t mean anything, but for the adult, it was a little bit funny because we all know that connections between names of cities or names of streets. Like I had a friend in college that his name was a play on the, on the, on being awake, being awake was like the, the meaning of his name. And he was living in the states called awakening. And it was just funny being away from awakening sleep, just, just to play, Danny:
Absolutely to remind yourself that connection with the audience, which we talked about earlier here. And it’s really important when, because you can react and react and it’s really important that connection. So when a kid shouts out something, you can re react to it and say, yeah, oh no. And create a dialogue and create a connection with those kids.

Danny:

And then the other kids, they all want attention. And so if you can give one kid attention, even social distancing, asking them questions, replying, listening, listening to their responses with your eyes and your ears and your senses. It’s really important. That’s why we talked about the eyes today. And you can look at them and say, yeah, I’m not a clown. I mean, I call myself an idiot, the ideas and people say, oh, you’re a really funny clown. They call me a clown without me having to call myself a clown. Zivi:
Yup. Yup. So to summarize on the adults, you can, you want to perform to everyone in the world. That’s the principle. You can do that by either using lines that are funny, mostly for the adults in that they go over the heads of the kids by being brilliant at what you do and being efficient and skills late in the, by just being very present in the moment and creating a unique even moment and who we might want to talk about it one day, about how, once you find something that works in your inputs, in your improvisation, you can synthesize the situation so that it will happen again.

Zivi:

For example, for me, it’s not that hard to create a situation where the kid will shout at me and say, you’re a clown. I can synthesize that moment again, just for the sake of bringing up back those gangs of macros.

Danny:

Yeah. And, and the, the thing about listening to the kids and creating a connection that will bring the adults in as well, because, oh, wow. This is not in their script. He’s gone completely. Or she has gone completely on improvising in the moment. Okay. Now it’s interesting because kids can do anything. And we all know that the adults know that, especially because the kids are the parents of the kids. So how is he going to cope with little Johnny standing up and shouting? You’re a clown. Okay, let’s watch this, put your phones away people. So that is another way of really engaging the kids.

So the adults are entranced as well.

Ziv:

Yeah. There, there are many other tips and advices that we want to share, and we’ll do that in an upcoming episode, ridiculous every week, these episodes of the season. And we’re kind of running out of time. Is there any, any last minute advice about how to improve your performances, how to shine while you’re performing so that even the adults in the room will enjoy your performance. We talked about a lot.

Danny:

We’ve talked an enormous amount today, include the adults, include them in the routine. Even if it’s from socially distance in their seats, you can get them to help you. You can get them to do things in the audience, a shout-out things, look up this on your phone, whatever, get them involved as you would do the kids. They’re big kids. We’re all kids.

Zivi:

Yeah. So keeps thank you so much for listening for this episode of kids entertainer academy at the thing I’ve enjoyed the comradery and just talking about these topics that we’re passionate about.

You’re a fountain of knowledge and you always deliver, thank you so much for sharing.

Danny:

It’s been great.

Zivi:

And we have more of these coming up next week. So make sure we use state to your favorite podcast player. Please go over to Facebook. If you in the Facebook game and look for the kids, entertainers Facebook group, and join us, continue to dialogue. And I hope that you’ve enjoyed today’s episode. We are always putting something special for you in the show notes of today’s episode, and that will be waiting for you kidsentertainercom in today’s episodes. You can find it and you can download the lecture or the PDF or something specific that will help you with the dogs. Thank you again and see you next week, guys. Danny:
Thank you. Bye.

Voice over:

Thanks for listening to the Kids Entertainer Podcast. Get the show notes, links and resources from today’s episode by visiting kidsntertainerhub.com.