I was trying to explain this to a friend of mine recently over messenger and my inability to stay on topic basically fucked it up for her. Probably sounded like nonsense. I say recently… When I wrote this paragraph and some of what’s below it was still 2019 and it felt like the world would soon be my oyster, forgetting that oysters are one of the main vectors for hepatitis and sure enough we would descend into a plague.
So anyway I’m going to have a crack at explaining it now.
This is how to turn problematic nervous energy into useful performing energy, and cast a few fireballs while you’re at it. It’s worth noting that while this works for me, it won’t necessarily work for anyone else. There is always the possibility that I’m just fucked up and accidentally found a glitch in my own emotional hardware.
But hey, maybe you can break your brain too!
Being an actor in modern Hollywood is hard. Acting is all about embodying a character and being in the moment. In a live performance the entire cast function together, aided by props, like a machine delivering a dramatic product with the feeling of genuine authenticity. Then, when they reach the peak of their careers, the lucky few will be plucked from obscurity to a million dollar contract on the set of a tent pole blockbuster movie, a fantastical epic in which they have to bring the same level of feeling and authenticity when faced with a blank green set, no costars, and the direction that there’s something indescribably amazing unfolding all around them.
One story from the production of The Hobbit was that Ian McKellen felt so lost in his months of solo green screen work that they built and decorated a set that didn’t appear in the film, just for him to return to between shooting and allow him to get into character. Contrast and compare to the story of James Spader on the set of Avengers Age of Ultron, acting alongside costars who were told to maintain eye-contact with a ball suspended four feet above the actors head because every time they looked at his actual face the final composited shot looked like they were staring directly at the crotch of an 8 foot tall robot.
My favourite are the wizard movies. Harry Potter, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The House With a Clock in it’s Walls¹, and even some non wizard fare like the X-Men all have the same kind of acting in them: pretending some kind of invisible energy is flowing through them and manifesting around them. The kids in Harry Potter had it easy because they at least had a wand to focus on and fight choreography. All the rest of them have their actors making pained expressions and claw like hand poses as they forge raw energy from the cosmos through their fingertips. All these films have a scene where they have to learn to use such power for the first time or do some grand final manifestation of their power, exerting more effort than they ever have before.
In reality, that kind of internalised effort is only ever felt when staining over on the toilet.
The way in which these skills are taught in the fiction is actually the same as the way the actors are taught to simulate the experience. Visualise the energy in their body, make the visualisation more intense until they can feel it², then through imagination and motion, shift it like a phantom limb³ and move it to the place you’re making the magic happen⁴.
The more you can visualise and feel that energy, the more you can tighten muscles in your arms to channel it right down to your fingertips and super heat the air between your hands into a plasma bolt to hurl against your enemy. I mean it won’t actually make a plasma bolt, but if you videoed it and edited one in, people could believe that came from you.
If you practice this a little you can add props into the mix, grab a stick, now it’s a magic wand! Grab a piece of paper, scrunch it into a ball, now compress it into a diamond like superman!
This exertion of self resisted effort is not entirely unlike the process of tensing muscles to pose for a bodybuilding magazine, although unless you’ve been working out on slowly increasing weights and a steady dose of anabolic steroids, the visual won’t resemble it at all. It is also not entirely unlike the kind of channeling techniques used in some meditative practices to visualise tension in the body as a kind of psychic energy which can be stored up and released. I guess what I’m saying is that pretending to have supernatural powers and attempting to channel actual supernatural powers are physiologically identical⁶.
So how does this relate to performing nerves? Dr. Richard Wiseman explains in his book Rip It Up that there is a sizeable body of research behind the idea that endocrinologically, many emotions are identical. Several notable pickup artists⁷ also assert this fact, noting that taking a partner on a rollercoaster will get excite them and they may associate that excitement with your presence and fall in love with you by mistake⁸.
Many a magician will rely on the cognitive behavioural trick of noting their fast pulse, shaking hands and shallow breathing as a sign that they’re excited for the show, rather than scared of it going wrong. This might work for some but as soon as it is recognised as a psychological trick it won’t work any more. The placebo effect is like that.
Now that I’ve prematurely freed you from that temporary fix, allow me to bring all these disparate threads together:
Next time you’re back stage at a show and you feel the trembling, the sweating and the prickles of fear, close your eyes. You are no longer Magic Nigel. You are now a mighty wizard⁹, and all the places you feel those physical symptoms are crackling with phosphorescent energy in a colour of your choice. As you breathe deeply, tighten the muscles in those areas, hunch or arch your back to clear the prickles, scrunch your face up, whatever it takes, and visualise that energy being channelled. You want to bring it all in to your core, the centre of your chest. With every breath in more energy is drawn down and with every breath out it burns brighter, like the bellows of a furnace. Finally feel it extending down your arms and hold your hands in front of you fingers curled like a spherical cage as the energy ripples out and creates a tiny flame at the focal point in the centre. This grows as the energy pours in and your hands need to be held former and firmer to contain it.
When the energy is shining so bright that you can barely contain it, far brighter than anything in your own body, hurl it somewhere. At a wall, at the ceiling, into the ground, just anywhere away from yourself where it will dissipate. As you’re doing this with your eyes closed you may even accidentally hurl this energy at another human being. In the unlikely occurrence that they happen to drop dead, please do not tell the authorities that you read this blog.
Either way you should now feel centred, calm, and ready to face the world with your 21 card trick. You are now an acolyte of the dark arts and I am your Satan. Conjour responsibly and hide all the evidence.
¹ Which for the duration of it’s big screen release I referred to solely as “The House with a Cock and Balls” because deep down I am 12 and always will be.
² How can you feel pretend energy? Well a good way to do that is to stand in a perfectly still pose, like a T pose. But not a T pose, because as Dynamo learned, any magician who does a T pose now will get a nasty letter from Kris Angel.
³ There are lots of ways to give yourself a phantom limb using a fake arm and a friend who will stroke it and your actual arm (obscured from your view) in the same place until your brain unexpectedly thinks the fake arm is your actual arm, with enough certainly to involuntarily flinch if the fake arm is then hit or stabbed in a way that would be painful. Similarly if you feel an unknown sensation and visualise the cause of it simultaneously, that visualisation can cause the sensation to intensify, like being tickled with a feather on the back of the neck and thinking it’s a spider, or getting trapped wind and mistaking it for a heart seizure.
⁴ Pun intended, there are actually a number of non-imaginary skills⁵ which use this visualisation method, including the ability to spontaneously orgasm. I haven’t mastered that particular technique myself but I watch a lot of good… um… documentaries.
⁵ Less amusingly this is used in many martial arts. They call the energy Qi and it represents a flow from the ground into the fighting limb. Through correct posture and flow the sensation of pressure between the foot and the ground is channelled into the space between your fist and some poor sod’s face. That’s just physics though. No fireballs.
⁶ Your belief system may vary.
⁷ None of whom I will name because they are scumbags
⁸ If you planned in advance for this to happen, falling in love with you is definitely a mistake.
⁹ If you’re sick of wizards after the many revelations of JK Rowling’s terrible stance on minorities, feel free to picture yourself as any of the following:
- The OA
- Wanda Maximov from the Avengers
- The kid from Akira
- The bad guy from X-Men First class
- Any good guy from JoJo’s Bizarre adventure
End note: The name of this post, “Casting Basic Fireballs”, is in fact meant to be a reference to the Sorcerers Apprentice, but on rewatching I discovered that the actual line in the scene is “Casting basic plasma bolts”. I think mine sounds better so I’m sticking with it.