So you want to be a creature of power...

Derren Brown might refer to this sort of magician as a demigod, a gateway figure between us and a world of wonder. Tyler Erickson would call him a creature of power. I've got an archetype assigned to him that I've blabbed about elsewhere. Regardless of what title you throw at this sort of magician, there's a commonality to them all -- when it's showtime, every single thing that the magician does points towards them being the real deal. They're not some bringer of miscellaneous tricks, they're not comedians first and magicians second, they're not gambling demonstrators or con artists or glorified jugglers... You watch them, and during their show, you get this unsettling feeling that they are truly capable of whatever it is they claim.

Let's assume you want to become one yourself. Let's assume that you feel the same way Tyler Erickson does, and that by embracing this sort of character, you're ready to cross the line between doing tricks and performing magic. How do you get there?

Derren Brown's talked at length about this in his own published works, and I'm not going to bother rewriting what he wrote. Also, I've blabbed at length myself about what I think about all this, and since I'm not yet personally invested in making a transition to that sort of character, I've decided to make this entry focus more on Tyler's thoughts on it, as this is a way of performing that he believes very much in.

I suppose, at this point, it's worth mentioning that this is all theoretical. If armchair quarterbacking isn't your thing, you might want to check out some other magic blogs. Otherwise, read on.

First, some axioms.

Axiom #1: Every magical effect has an implied claim to power.

You tear apart a tissue paper and then you restore it. Whether or not you personally make the outward claim to have the power of causing tissue fibers to heal themselves, that's essentially the illusion that you're creating. To put it another way, even if you feel it's over the top to make any personal claim to that power, you probably wouldn't be happy if people believed you just switched a bunch of torn up pieces for a new tissue paper, or if people believed you just had some sort of invisible glue. We might diffuse this by saying "It's a trick" or "It's an illusion" or whatnot, but the truth is, the strength of it is going to come from people's perceptions of an impossibility, and the power that caused that impossibility is going to go hand-in-hand with the impossibility itself.

Axiom #2: It is inherent in the performance of a strong magic effect for the spectators to seek a power-based explanation, whether or not you claim it.

For the moment, we're going to assume that the trick is so good and so compelling that people aren't going to dismiss it outright. Some might anyway, but if the effect has strength, they're at least going to give credit to something. The explanations here might be supernatural-based ("He can read minds." or "He can fly.") or they might be non-supernatural guesses ("He's got fast hands." or "He does fantastic illusions."). But unless the spectator knows (or believes they know) the exact solution to a strong magic effect, they are going to be naturally inclined to attribute something to the performer, and the implied power being claimed is going to be a filter in all that, either in terms of it being an explanation that they embrace, or an explanation that they're desperately looking for evidence to disprove.

The idea of being a creature of power is to understand these two axioms, and to try to build your performances to take advantage of them. Tyler offers four steps to get there, and the first three steps are actually pretty simple.

First, imagine yourself having the power. "I am capable of telekinesis."

Second, figure out what could exhibit the power. "I can make things move and shake and float."

Third, find effects that match the exhibitions. PK Pen, Floating Bill, Glorpy, etc.

Fourth, have an assortment of methods to exhibit the same power, but using different methodologies. Meaning, you need to be able to cancel methods on the macro scale. (For a quick introduction to cancelling methods, read here.) Cancelling methods is usually talked about in terms of a single effect, but the idea here is to find different effects that showcase different dimensions to the power, and build off each other.

Now, there are some very tough powers to claim, claims that are unsustainable because they're simply too big. Perhaps you can find the evidence to back the claims up within the show, but again, it's possible to come up with a claim that disproves itself theatrically. For instance, consider the Headline Prediction. The implied claim to power is that you know what's going to happen in the future. When you successfully pull off the effect, the implication is either that (a) you cheated anyway, or (b) you know when planes are going to crash and you're an asshole for not telling people.

The idea, then, is to find ways to soften the claim a little bit. You could try to add limitations to the power ("These things come to me randomly in dreams, and I write them down.") or else change the effect to a different style of prediction (go from a headline prediction to a clipline prediction) or else say that the whole thing is a "psychological illusion", or else... well, it's hard to give out hard and fast rules, mostly because it's going to be claim-dependent, and art basically resists that sort of rule imposition by nature. But there are creative ways to get around the problem of a claim that is dismissed outright as implausible. For instance, Eugene Burger talked about how he resisted the idea of framing his effect "Inevitability" as a demonstration of the power to predict the future, opting for a more metaphorical and ambiguous presentation. Others have said that they liked the idea of claiming that they while they can't predict the outcome of random events, they can subtly engineer certain outcomes if they have access to the agents at work. For instance, Brown in Something Wicked This Way Comes shows that he forced the audience as a whole to end up with the final word, and Banachek says that while he can't predict how the lottery will turn out, if he were locked in a room with somebody who was randomly choosing numbered balls from the bin, that he could influence the person into choosing the balls that he wanted. In both cases, we've got people who have really studied not just the effects, but the powers that they want to say are the cause for the effects.

But even mentalists have to be careful about the powers they claim, despite playing in the realm of the more plausible magic. After all, it's going to be difficult to support the claim that you're a mind-reader if you have to ask for a spectator's name before each routine. Again, though, these things can be played with. Performers have been known to secretly get that sort of information before the effect starts, and even trying to downplay the revelation of the name as not really being an effect (a dual reality ploy to ensure that the spectator knows the performer didn't really mean it to be an effect, all the while giving the audience the evidence they need to believe the performer just divined the name). Also, you can state that perhaps some things are easier to read than others -- for instance, emotions and imagery -- and in fact this can open fun doors presentationally, by using emotions and imagery as the motifs necessary to bring about an effect to a successful conclusion.

Getting back to traditional magic, though, the idea of embracing power is a bit trickier. Consider a Cups and Balls finale. If you think about it, lifting a cup to show fruit where there was no fruit before should be perceived as an outright impossibility. The magician willed new matter to come into the universe. Truth be told, though, this claim is undermined by the fact that the Cups and Balls usually has a feeling of sleight of hand, in which a dozen moves might be involved in making a half-dozen effects happen. It's still possible to combat this. I watched as Tyler once did the Cups and Balls for a person, and afterwards we asked the guy how he thought it was all done. He gave some guesses that were pretty close to the truth, but in the end, Tyler was still operating with high enough prestige that the guy didn't want to offer any guesses lest they be taken as ridiculous. It was a while ago so I can't remember precisely, but his general sentiment (paraphrased) was "I think you would have to sneak stuff from the pockets, but if that happened, then I totally missed it." He was clearing avoiding committing himself to a theory of how it all could have happened for fear of sounding stupid (thus is the power of prestige), but even then we still have a situation where the intuitive solution is pretty close to the actual solution, and an effect where the implied claim to power in the Cups and Balls climax ("I can create new matter.") is unsustainable given that the more palatable explanation ("I've got super fast hands.") has not been explicitly disproven.

Thinking on a larger level, there are gray areas where, if the magic isn't obvious, the power could be ambiguous. If you're a high diver, and you do ten backflips from a ten meter platform, people will be amazed by the implausibility of it, but the implied power will be one of skill. If, on the other hand, you dive off the platform, levitate in space for several seconds, and then do the ten backflips, you've just shown something that skill doesn't explain. In most cases, with the Cups and Balls, the spectators, even if they're fooled at the time by the revelations, will probably be able to come up with explanations in retrospect that approximate the truth. Our hands might not be fast, per se, but our choreography of actions are usually too brisk to decode on first viewing, and in actuality our hands are very much involved. Sleight of hand in general is a difficult tool to use, because Tyler's "poison of the hands" principle can easily be applied to explain away too many magic effects as being skill-based. It's not the same as the Coin in Bottle, for instance. "Fast hands" can't explain that.

The issue is that magicians are usually sending mixed messages all the time about what their powers are. If they don't look at things through the filter of claiming specific powers, they lose (or compromise) the tool of macro cancelling, and they lose the ability to do post-production performances of a given ability. A magician who is armed with several strategies for doing a transposition, for instance, might be better able to fend off suspicions that he just switches things all the time. So, while it might be overkill to do a ten phase copper/silver routine in the show, he could have a couple of extra strategies when approached by people eager to tell the magician that they know what he's doing.

So what are some good powers to claim, then? According to Tyler, the best part of claiming a power is its limits, establishing why you can't do something bigger. An example might be showcasing the ability to affect small pieces of metal -- coins, keys, paperclips. Related powers could be changing the metal's temperature (making it hotter or colder), making it move (PK), imbuing it with magnetic properties, and making it warp or bend or morph (the cigarette through quarter effect, for instance, could easily be reframed as a morphing of the coin, rather than a straight-forward penetration.)

An example of a routine that Tyler thought would be particularly good at supporting a power claim in this realm, would be something like the following... A magician borrows a quarter, and holds it in his fist for a while, and when he gives it back to the spectator, the coin's actually colder than it was before. The magician then takes it back, and warms it up so that it's a bit hotter than usual. Finally, he squeezes it once more, and the coin is shown to have bent. This series of effects would help sell a very specific power.

If the magician took that borrowed coin and changed it into a British Penny, though, the implied power claim would be too strong to be believable. A thinking spectator would be more likely to think a switch... but a different performer claiming a different power could always run with that and still remain in the realm of wielding a plausible power, and do a routine in which a borrowed coin and a British Penny kept switching places. Then different things would need to be evaluated. Would a spellbound change work? Or would it be too strong, pointing towards manipulative skill and away from a switch under impossible conditions? When discussing his $0 Bill Transposition, Jay Sankey makes the point that in order to really sell the effect, you don't make the things transpose when they're across the room from each other, you make them transpose when they're inches away from each other, with only a purse separating them.

Extrapolating to a larger point, if the claim is too unbelievable, people can't follow you because it's unsustainable. David Copperfield, for all the compelling illusions that he offers, is going to have trouble selling himself as a creature of power. Things like flying, making the Statue of Liberty disappear, these are going to have to be sold as illusions even if all evidence within the performance points towards the effect actually happening. David Blaine floating a couple of inches off the ground is going to be more believable than Copperfield flying. Few stage illusions in general are sustainable -- the ones that survive (like Metamorphosis and Zig Zag) do so because there's a plausible quality to them that an audience can follow. A trick with too much scope and scale will risk testing people's "bullshit threshold" (quoting Tyler), because deep down people know that an actual exhibition of too strong a power means that the government would lock you up.

Tyler believes that the best approach in figuring out a repertoire is to group effects to see which ones reinforce each other, rather than contradict each other. It also means figuring out different ways to demonstrate the power. If you're limited to a single prop (such as only cards or only coins or what have you) then you're akin to a body builder with one really big bicep. With cards, there's a concept called "From A Shuffled Deck In Use" (shortened to FASDIU) which encapsulates effects that can be pulled off, well, from a shuffled deck in use. In my view, somebody who can operate FASDIU has a better chance of claiming many different sorts of powers -- when it's time to do a transposition, he can find a way to do it with any old ratty deck of cards, rather than pulling out the nifty little packet trick that nobody else can examine. Going outside of cards, what's necessary in claiming a power is to adopt a FASDIU mindset with any prop, and having a toolset capable of handling a variety of venues. Tyler likens this approach to magic as being similar to Jackie Chan and bucket drummers. Jackie Chan doesn't need to run away from fights if he doesn't have a sword or nunchaku on him because he can kick ass with various random items in his immediate vicinity, and bucket drummers look at everything as a percussive instrument, as something they can create music with. This mindset can be brought to magic as well, with the right training.

Of course, if there is a downside to playing the creature of power, it's in not understanding that there's a time and a place for playing that character, and risking becoming Job from Arrested Development. There's almost an inevitable hint of controversy when you portray a character in a magic show and refuse to call what you do "tricks", or else lead the spectator into places where they actually wonder if magic is at play. There's also no doubt that people would expect you to be "on" 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in much the same way that they'd expect a standup comedian to say something funny at the drop of a hat. Still, when done well, this sort of magic can lead to very compelling theater. Again, I don't know if I buy into the whole "tricks" vs. "magic" dichotomy, but there's definitely something there that separates this sort of performance character from the others.