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Practice until you can do each and every part of your act as if it takes no effort at all. It’s something we’ve all heard. Is it really the best advice for a working mentalist, though? As with many things that have come up so far in this column, the answer isn’t so straightforward as one might think.

From a technical standpoint, there’s no argument that this is great advice. If you can’t do the secret stuff without hesitation, you shouldn’t be doing it at all. Any performer in any field of entertainment, be it acting, magic, mentalism, juggling, or anything else, needs to have the confidence to be able to do their “thing” without worrying about the technical aspects of it. As the saying goes, he who hesitates is lost.

When it comes to presentation, though, we need to ask ourselves how we want our feats of mentalism to appear. Should we make it appear as if it takes every last ounce of energy we have to make these miraculous happenings occur, or should it appear to be as easy as raising our hands?

On the question of apparent effort, mentalism isn’t all that much different from juggling (don’t shoot yet, just stay with me!). Both are demonstrations of skill (or supposed skill) that is done in an entertaining fashion. The audience knows how the juggler juggles, just as the audience knows how (or how they believe) the mentalist performs his feats (unlike magic, where the idea is that they don’t know how it’s done).

If this is the case, we’d do well to learn from what jugglers have done for ages. They start out with easy stuff that looks easy. This looks cool, but only mildly impressive. Then they move up to harder feats that they still manage to make look relatively easy. That’s where things get very impressive. To finish, most good jugglers do something that not only seems like it should be hard, but that they readily admit (through actions if not words) is very hard. This builds up suspense and interest, the audience wanting the performer to be able to successfully do what he proposes. The juggler will usually falter a bit, dropping the ball or visibly hesitating before he finally successfully accomplishes what he set out to do. This is what wins the audience over, both impressing them and making the performer somebody they can side with, somebody who isn’t just this juggling machine, but is a real human being. Replace the word “juggler” with the word “mentalist”, and “juggling” with “mind reading” in these last few sentences, and see what you get!

How you balance the mix of easy feats and hard feats will depend on your presentational premise, which I’ve talked about in previous essays here. Let’s take a couple of popular premises and see what works best for them:

First, there’s the Uri Geller type of performer, who goes on the premise that everything he does is 100% true psychic phenomena (again, we’ll leave the discussion of the merits of these various presentational ruses out of this for the time being). For this performer, I think that a mix of effort should be involved. Some things, perhaps even most, should appear to take quite a bit of effort. Anybody who’s seen Uri perform has seen how long he’ll milk the smallest bend in a spoon for, concentrating and gesticulating for an incredibly long amount of time before causing the bend. To do this all the time, though, would be both dull and illogical...after all, as with any skill, psychic powers would be expected to become easier and more developed with practice. Going with that, then, some things should be very easy...requiring no more effort to read a participant’s thoughts than to read your own. Mix it up, to show that your skills are well developed, but the more dramatic effects still take a lot of energy out of you. After all, the premise here is that, particularly with PK effects, you’re using a great deal of energy from your body to cause the effect (for example, directing your energy and concentration towards a spoon to cause it to bend). Logic says that, as with physical exercise, this mental exercise should be somewhat straining.

If, on the other hand, you choose to go the route of a psychological entertainer, as with Banachek, Marc Salem, Ned Rutledge, and other notable performers whom I’ve discussed before, I feel that most of your effects shouldn’t take as much effort. If you’re using psychology, it should be a quick procedure to take in and study a person’s actions and responses to determine what you need to know. You never saw Sherlock Holmes, the master of this sort of deductive reasoning, hesitate, did you? On the other hand, that’s not to say that Sherlock Holmes’s displays of deduction were easy. They weren’t. He made them seem so, though, because they had become so natural to him that he didn’t have to hesitate. He took things in and immediately made the connections he needed to. For the most part, I think this is a valid approach for the working psychological entertainer as well. Again, some feats would probably do well to be done slowly and with some pause for thought, as in a drawing duplication or a psychometry effect.

Even here, though, I think most PK effects should appear to take quite a bit of effort. Presuming that you’re using a Banachek-style presentation, you’re going on the premise of using psychological techniques to help create the illusion of psychokinetic activity. That said, then, I would think you’d want to create the most accurate illusion possible, and so then we fall back to what I said about these sorts of effects earlier.

Of course, these aren’t rules written in stone in either case. In general, if everything looks easy, it’s not impressive. Contrarily, if everything looks hard, it’s slow and boring. Mix it up, and find the balance that works for you.

Andy