Use Your Hands (Even If You Are A Mentalist)
by Kenton Knepper

We are told quite often that we need to develop something called “showmanship.” Yet if you observe various performers it is difficult to define what “showmanship” really means. Is showmanship a con, a hustle, to act boisterously, to act in some over-the-top manner, to be egomaniacal, or to be who you are?

Whatever showmanship is, there are a few very simple things that can increase your level of showmanship very quickly. Here is one such method.

Use Your Hands

Imagine that you must communicate everything you mean in a trick with your hands alone. A legendary singer was once told to “use your hands” to express herself, as she seemed unemotional and bland on stage. We can learn a great deal from this instruction. A singer cannot talk or explain anything other than what she may be singing. Hands are a good way to try and show emotions as one sings. Otherwise, they are just there – unused.

How do we use our hands in magic and mentalism? We tend to think that in magic hands are meant to accomplish secret somethings, and that this is their primary job. More advanced people will also consider hands are meant to touch appropriately and kindly to make a more endearing connection. In mentalism, hands are used to write things down or hold a book.

But from a perspective of showmanship, using your hands means something far more important. Think of a trick or effect right now that you do – any one you perform currently. You may need to use your hands when they are busy holding props or shuffling cards or writing a prediction. But what do your hands do when they are not busy?

If I say to a spectator, “Hold on tight” to a sponge ball, I make a clenched fist with my own hands. This is visual education and helps people follow what I mean for them to do. But of more interest is the feeling my hand creates by making a fist. The audience feels a sense of strength and power as I am demonstrating this with my clenched hand. Sure the hand motion keeps the spectator from opening their hand until I need, but the rest of the audience tends to say things after such as “Her hand was clenched so tight her fingers were turning white – but he got that other ball in her hand somehow!”

Yet this example also pales from what hands can really do.

Hands can express emotion. While reading this, use your hands and try to do what I say. Express anger with your hand. Good. A closed fist shaking is excellent. A finger pointed up may or may not be appropriate for most audiences however, and really that is too gross to be deemed artistic much of the time.

Now have your hand show happiness. Be happy and use your hand or hands. It’s almost an applause gesture, I suppose. Yes, your facial expression matters too naturally. But your face is close to your body. Note how your hands have moved out away from your body as you try to express happiness with them.

Fear, anger, shock, upset and other mainly negative seeming emotions tend to have the hands closer in to the body. So do “colder” emotions and cold climate suggestions primarily. Kindness, enthusiasm, helpfulness, rising upward, happiness, warm or loving gestures tend to have the hands and arms more open and away from the body.

How would you show the emotion of “flying high” or “soaring” with your hands and arms? Try it! How would you express coins coming down from the sky? How might you use your hands to gather thoughts from the air and into your mind? How might you show with your hands the idea that the spectator must focus on a word or thought? How would you express with your hand that you are sending a thought out into the audience?

Note that most of the motions you give out are larger in comparison to the ones you make in towards yourself. It’s like a large triangle with the point at the center of your body. The larger base is out in the back of the audience, even close up. Your hands and arms slide along this triangulated line of communication. The triangle may tilt at angles, but mainly you as a performer are the point of the triangle. To get the audience to see you, you will need to use more of that space within the triangle, and move your hands to the back and outer edges of that triangle. The point of the triangle (you) is as a dot compared to the majority of what makes up the rest of that triangle.

I am sure you can use your hand to show something rising up, whether it is a card, a thought or a person in the audience coming out of their chair to join you on stage (or at a performance space in a living room). You probably will lift your hand palm up and raise your hand, and then pull that hand closer toward your body. It’s as if you stretched your arm to one side of the invisible triangle, and then brought it in to a point near you.

You might also however raise your hand and turn your entire body so that arm remains extended and open as you gesture for someone to come up on stage. You extend and move the “triangle” more broadly that way, where it can be seen well by more people.

I am not giving you hard and fast rules here as we have not the time or space, and I want you open to learning what is best for YOU anyway. EXPERIMENT. Think about how your hands and arms might communicate deeper meaning to your audience. Don’t use your hands only for mundane, physical expression.

Work on using your hands to express emotion. Use your hands to symbolically express what you want an audience to feel. Use your hands to help your audience envision more than what the trick alone can show them. Play with how your hands might express a range of emotion and meaning. Then start incorporating those discoveries into your magic and mentalism.

Mentalism can be very intellectual. Your hands can bring emotion to otherwise mental processes alone. Gesture and non-verbal communication is the language of the subconscious or unconscious, where emotions live. Your hands communicate to the deeper mind of the audience, even as you distract the conscious mind with mental focus. Consider the power in that!

If your act happens primarily in the minds of an audience, then gestures and hand movement is doubly important. If you don’t have any hands or arms at all, or feet or legs, then torso and head movement, positioning on stage, as well as your costuming all make to express more emotionally what you wish to communicate.

If you are one of the lucky ones who have hands, arms and legs - even one hand and arm, then you are too fortunate to be ignoring your gift. Use your hand and arm to express MORE. Make your presence deeper and larger by using your hand and arm gestures to express greater things than mere trick mechanics.

Spend just one week considering how hands and arms express emotion, and it will change the way you do “showmanship” forever.

I promise.

Kenton