We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Erik Dobell a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Erik, thanks for joining us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

Mentalism is a branch of magic and most folks see their first magician when they are a child. I was about 20 or 21 years old, so a little older than most but still a child.

I saw this magician in a mall in Ithaca, New York. The magician was selling tricks from a little kiosk and he showed me a few things and I was amazed. I had never seen anything like this before. So I bought a few tricks, learned them, did them for some friends and fell in love with magic.

I went back to see the same magician at the same mall at the same kiosk a week later, and he was selling sunglasses. Come to find out he wasn’t a magician. He was just some guy that bought a bunch of overstock, rented a spot in the mall and sold it.

I often wonder about that guy. He’ll never know the impact he had on my life.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I started performing little tricks for friends and family and soon started doing them for strangers. Doing magic tricks for friends and family is the worst.

Soon I started doing magic at bars and restaurants just for fun, then I was getting hired. Eventually I developed a parlor act and started working private parties at people’s houses, libraries, and colleges. This eventually led to having my own show in a theater in Gatlinburg, Tennessee and that’s where I’m currently at.

The thing I’m most proud of is that I was able to somehow make it work. Agents wouldn’t work with me, I don’t have a PR team and no one is going to pluck me out of a crowd and put me on TV. I did it by having a good show, and having the audience spread the word.

How did you build your audience on social media?

We built a bulk of our social media presence after opening in Gatlinburg, and we did it by giving value to the audience. I know it sounds cliche’, but you really do need to give people what they want.

We realized most people traveling to Gatlinburg aren’t going to be searching for a magic show, so we focused our social media posts on Gatlinburg as a whole. Where to go, what to do, a lot of “top 10” lists about the attractions in town. Somewhere in the videos we would mention that we had a magic show at the Gatlinburg Space Needle.

Some of these videos did rather well, and we sold tickets because of it. Basically, we provided information people were searching for and inserted our information into it as well.

My advice to people building a social media presence is don’t be too concerned with how many followers or likes you have. It’s about quantity and engagement.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding aspect of because an artist is taking something that doesn’t exist, it’s just an idea, and making it something that does exist. All the better when the audience likes it!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.impossibilitiesshow.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/impossibilities_show
• Facebook: facebook.com/impossibilitiesshow
• Twitter: twitter.com/bestmagicshow
• Youtube: youtube.com/impossibilitiesshow
• Other: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60842-d9835265-Reviews-Impossibilities_Magic_Mindreading_and_Mayhem-Gatlinburg_Tennessee.html

Image Credits
I have the rights to this images.