Our Comedy and Magic performances are fun, funny, and highly engaging magic and comedy events developed specifically for specialist audiences. We thoroughly believe that everyone can benefit greatly from face-to-face, fun, engaging and enjoyable entertainment. These audiences can include – but aren’t limited to – people with neurological conditions, acquired and traumatic brain injuries, learning disabilities, physical and mobility needs, behavioural, psychological, and emotional needs, mental health needs, and a wide range of complex needs.
We have dedicated the last five years of our life to carefully crafting, honing and developing high-quality and appropriate shows that can be adapted for everybody with all levels of differing abilities.
Our Comedy and Magic events and performances are not just magic shows – they contain a lot of magic and a wide mix of entertainment, including comedy, music, props, and much more – you can be rest assured that we incorporate appropriate elements that you would expect from a professional show and bring them in in a way that everyone can enjoy!
Enjoyment, entertainment, happiness and well-being are at the core of everything we do, and our Specialised Shows have been carefully designed using cutting-edge neuroscience, psychology and professional’s input from across a wide range of sectors. What we do creates engaging, entertaining and meaningful experiences that everyone, including staff, carers, friends and family, can share and enjoy. You can find out more about the scientific benefits of live entertainment here.
We are Alex and George – a father-and-son team of professional magicians and comedians. We combine George’s expertise as a psychologist and Alex’s background in arts and magic, with nearly 15 years of working together, both in the voluntary and public sector, to provide tailor-made entertainment in specialist settings.
Our Comedy and Magic shows are wonderfully funny and engaging magic shows, packed full of creative, engaging and fun performances that are built to engage and connect with audiences across a wide variety of needs, requirements and abilities.
As always, we would love to chat with you and share more about our ideas, our vision, philosophy and our mission to share comedy and magic for all! Please call Alex on 07982 145 631 or George on 07941 521 469, or you can email either george@agmagicians.com or alex@agmagicians.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
You can see a number of photos from our Comedy and Magic shows below. These have all been previously published by the various organisations we have worked with on their Social Media and websites.
We have been very lucky for the past 5 years to work with a wide range of organisations, groups and individuals that have dedicated their energy, time and passion into working in this field. Below is just a small sample of what some of these wonderful people have been kind enough to say about our shows:
Alex & George have been coming to our neurological care centre for a while now. Their sessions are really well received. They bring joy & smiles to our residents & staff. They engage with our residents throughout the show to give them entertainment in their day. Our resident’s moods are up lifted, with laughter & conversation. The fun filled session Alex & George bring keeps everyone engaged with their funny props including a squeaky chicken & musical instrument. We will continue having Alex & George come to our care centre to give our residents a visual & colourful session where they can get involved in during their day.
Lisa Zoella, Therapy Assistant
Manor House, Stafford
As always, we would love to chat with you and share more about our ideas, our vision, philosophy and our mission to share comedy and magic for all! Please call Alex on 07982 145 631 or George on 07941 521 469, or you can email either george@agmagicians.com or alex@agmagicians.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
Over the past two-and-a-half years, we have worked with and delivered multiple shows to a huge variety of specialist practices focusing on complex mental health needs and neurological care, for a wide range of numbers from just 6-beds to complexes with up to 250 people. You can see just a few of the organisations and individual homes below:
As always, we would love to chat with you and share more about our ideas, our vision, philosophy and our mission to share comedy and magic for all! Please call Alex on 07982 145 631 or George on 07941 521 469, or you can email either george@agmagicians.com or alex@agmagicians.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
We are both very proud members of Equity – the variety and entertainment organisation that has served actors, entertainers, and live variety acts for nearly 100 years.
We are both professional entertainers – meaning we earn our living out of performing around the UK and across the world – and so we are very happy to belong to Equity. It means we are covered for Public Liability Insurance up to £10,000,000 and belong to a 47,000 strong group of professional performers.
We pride ourselves on being prompt, both in communication, and on never having been late to a paid performance. We are always open and transparent about what we do and always strive to deliver a high-quality, engaging and fascinating performance!
We thoroughly believe that everyone can, and should, gain great benefit from live, face-to-face and interactive entertainment. It is our mission to bring our fun, funny and engaging Comedy and Magic events and performances to as many people as possible, whilst maintaining an appropriate and applicable theme for each of our audiences.
This means that each performance is reflective of the audience – which can include, but are not limited to, people with neurological conditions, acquired and traumatic brain injuries, learning disabilities, physical and mobility needs, behavioural, psychological, and emotional needs, mental health needs, and a wide range of complex needs.
We strive to create high levels of engagement, entertainment and enjoyment with each of our performances and events. This is done through sticking as closely as we can to the following ECEE and LOAR models:
Every one of our audiences are made up of individuals, and we never forget this fact: each individual in our audience has their own specific needs, requirements and expectations.
Each performance is different, unique, and varied – some days people are buoyant, mischievous and engaged, other days they may be more introvert, reflective and a bit quieter. Sometimes people need to be coaxed out of their shell a little, and sometimes the loudest people just want to be acknowledged. It’s all a matter of understanding these needs and creating a warm, welcoming and inclusive space to explore these needs.
By creating moments of Encountering, we can observe people’s needs, requirements and expectations, and change our performance to reflect these. This is why we usually arrive early, set up either before people come into the room, or give ourselves enough time before “the show” begins properly to introduce ourselves, get to know some or all of our audience, and then shift the emphasis of our performance accordingly.
Connection is at the core of everything that we do. Once we have encountered as many people in the audience as possible, we endeavour to create connections with them in the present moment.
This is often through creating moments of laughter, fun and enjoyment, particularly ones that as many people can engage with at once – but is also achieved by using music, interaction, conversation and moments where the scripted parts of the show and our characters step back into the background and where we experience real, honest and deep moments of connection.
There is more on this in our LOAR model below.
We’ve all been to shows, talks and presentations where we feel as if the speaker, actor or performer is just reading off a list or from a sheet of paper. We refer to this as when performers are “speaking at” rather “speaking to” their audience. This can be a particularly common occurrence in specialised setting when the performer is not aware of or is inexperienced with their audience needs, is too worried about saying/doing the wrong things, or is unprepared for some of the audience’s responses.
We are fully dedicated to creating moments of Engagement, where we are present in the room, aware of our audience’s requirements, creating rich and meaningful moments of connection and treating our audience members with the respect and dignity that everyone deserves.
Creating these moments of Engagement means that our magic is visual and varied, our comedy is appropriate and fitting to our audience, we create a warm, friendly and welcoming atmosphere, we actively go out into the audience and create multiple moments of interaction, and that we as performers are never patronising, unprepared, or take our audience for granted.
At the end of the day, we are Entertainers. We want people watching our shows and attending our events to feel a sense of wonder and delight, a sense of happiness and joy, and a kind of feeling that only live, face-to-face performances can bring.
We use comedy and magic as a set of tools to do this – as ways to reinforce the previous steps in this model.
We use Entertainment to create moments where we Encounter our audience, where we get to know them better as human beings.
We use Entertainment to share moments of Connection, where sharing a laugh or exploring an artistic theme becomes a gateway to understanding the person more.
We use Entertainment to create moments of Engagement, where comedy, magic, music and much more, makes special moments shared between father-and-son, mother-and-daughter, friends, family, carers, staff members, or anywhere else.
All together, we carefully craft moments where we can all share a sense of joy, delight and freedom through coming together and enjoying live entertainment.
The most rewarding moments for us are when we see our audience’s faces light up, and when we are told “I haven’t laughed/been that amazed/enjoyed myself like that for years”, or when relatives have said “I haven’t seen them be that active for years!” This shows us that we are taping into a rich, deep vein of entertainment that people haven’t experienced for a long time, often since they were children. That is truly the culmination of creating moments of Encountering, Connection, Engagement and Entertainment.
As always, we would love to chat with you and share more about our ideas, our vision, philosophy and our mission to share comedy and magic for all! Please call Alex on 07982 145 631 or George on 07941 521 469, or you can email either george@agmagicians.com or alex@agmagicians.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
Our LOAR model comes from a deep love for and appreciation of Improvisation, and all of the skills that this entails. At its heart is the idea of constantly being present, which means that we are always paying attention to what’s happening in the room, being aware of the people, listening to their responses, observing behaviours, acknowledging people’s requirements and responding appropriately. Not only does this ensure a high quality of performance, it also means that we are flexible with our approach and can deliver very specific shows to very specific audiences. LOAR is not necessarily a linear process, as it is more of a feedback loop – one aspect feeds into another, which feeds into another, which feeds back into the first aspect.
The first step for any communication is to be on the lookout for it. By constantly listening, looking and being aware of different forms of communication – verbal, non-verbal, shifts in people’s attention, shifts in people’s behaviours, etc. – we are always open to feedback and flexible in our responses.
Listening also requires the ability to be present, a key factor in any rich and engaging experience. We must be active and engaged in what is happening around us to be listening, and we must always be open to taking the responses on board and shifting our approach to match them appropriately.
Acknowledgment is a key principle that allows everyone in the room to feel present, as well as us as performers. It’s all very well and good to pick up on body language cues or a shift in the energy of the room, but without acknowledging the contribution of the audience – whether it’s prompted by us or not – this energy often dissipates and goes nowhere.
Instead, we do our very best to use the feedback that we have listened to and observed to feed the momentum, energy and liveliness of the show and our performance, making it a unique and inclusive event for everybody in the room.
Much like listening, observing comes from being aware and present in the moment. We do our best to be tuned to our audience’s responses, i.e. does this joke work, does that line get a positive or a negative response, does this idea resonate, do these tricks make sense, do I come across as welcoming and open, etc. etc.
Observation also comes with an open-minded and flexible approach, so that we are always ready and willing to shift our performances into something appropriate for the people in front of us.
Our response isn’t just limited to verbal acknowledgement of the communication, but to taking action on it. For example, we might ask; has the energy in the room dropped? Then we need to either shift gears, try something different, or inject a piece of music to reignite the buzzing atmosphere. Or, has someone said something that’s really funny? In classic improvisation, we take this idea and run with it, making sure that person gets the credit they rightly deserve.
This response then fuels the feedback loop, creating more moments for us to listen out for, more behaviours to observe, and more aspects we can acknowledge and respond to.
As always, we would love to chat with you and share more about our ideas, our vision, philosophy and our mission to share comedy and magic for all! Please call Alex on 07982 145 631 or George on 07941 521 469, or you can email either george@agmagicians.com or alex@agmagicians.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
Our comedy and magic events and performances are an incredibly unique and engaging way to entertain and share something fun and different with people – we count ourselves as being incredibly lucky going around the country sharing these wonderful moments.
We know and appreciate how important the experience of live entertainment is for everyone. It is a time where we can all come together and share in a fun, joyful and sometimes profound experience.
We love seeing people enjoying themselves, laughing and having fun together, whether they are actively engaging and joining in or just taking in the atmosphere of our performances. We know how vital this is for everyone’s wellbeing.
This is very personal to us – George has spent much of his life in the public and voluntary sector as a psychologist working with vulnerable adults, and Alex has explored, developed and found himself through his own personal mental health journey. We’re always very moved by the responses we receive from our audiences.
Because of this, we know how significant our shows can be – we are always dedicated to delivering high-quality, appropriate and enjoyable entertainment across the country to as many people as possible.
Alex and George are father-and-son comedians and magicians who perform professionally across the UK.
George began developing his skills with magic in the early 1990’s as a psychologist in a small non-profit organisation working with excluded and vulnerable people. He used it to both demonstrate important psychological principles and young people’s confidence, well-being and self-esteem.
Alex grew up surrounded by magic, performers and people who felt a strong calling for equality, inclusion and social justice. He began attending acting school in the early 2000’s and has always loved stage, screen and storytelling. He is a huge advocate for using the performing arts to explore and enhance mental health and well-being.
Together, they began performing in 2011 and haven’t looked back since. They have worked closely with and learned from some of the leading performers and entertainers in the industry for the last two decades, taking them across the world from Las Vegas to Blackpool.
They currently live in the West Midlands and travel across the UK performing their magic, comedy and variety shows as AGMagicians.
As always, we would love to chat with you and share more about our ideas, our vision, philosophy and our mission to share comedy and magic for all! Please call Alex on 07982 145 631 or George on 07941 521 469, or you can email either george@agmagicians.com or alex@agmagicians.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
All of our Comedy and Magic events and performances have been designed and developed from the ground up with an inclusive and welcoming audience in mind.
Both of us have a over 5 decades of combined experience working in the public and voluntary sector, and so when it comes to understanding the needs and abilities of our audience and creating an instant, compassionate and meaningful relationship with them, there couldn’t be any two finer performers up for the task.
We are using cutting edge neuroscience, psychological and neuroaesthetic evidence that stimulating activities, often involving art, music, language, learning and storytelling, help improve interactions, mood and well-being for every body, regardless of abilties or requirements.
We pride ourselves on our inclusive approach to prioritising well-being through live, interactive performance.
There has been a number of government and government-backed research papers over the last 5 years that prove how access to arts makes care home residents happier and healthier (see Key Evidence below for more).
We believe that residents should be offered a wide range of arts activities to enhance their quality of life and increase their wellbeing. Our aim is to provide a wide-range of variety-themed activities in our Afternoon Delights show (such as signing, dancing, mime, puppetry, circus acts and more) that allows a wide band of residents access to an artistic experience.
By using a neuroscience-informed approach, we aim to stimulate people watching and engaging on a whole number of levels. We use a multi-sensory approach including noise makers, tactile objects, props, hats, musical cues and, of course, visual and cognitive magic, to reach out to as wide a range of residents as possible. This has been shown (see the evidence below this section) through much research to aid in helping mood, well-being and social interactions in many people.
BOOKS
Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us
Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic
SLEIGHTS OF MIND: What the neuroscience of magic reveals about our brains
VIDEOS
The Neuroscience of Magic – with Gustav Kuhn
Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen reveal the power of Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us
Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen | Your Brain on Art
Rewiring Revolution: Neuroplasticity’s Impact on Wellbeing | Kristen Meisenheimer
Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are | Amy Cuddy
ARTICLES
Ways To Wellness – Long-term Service Conditions
Social prescribing and long-term conditions
As always, we would love to chat with you and share more about our ideas, our vision, philosophy and our mission to share comedy and magic for all! Please get in touch using our details below! We look forward to hearing from you!
