There is a story Ken Weber tells in Maximum Entertainment that I have thought about more than almost anything else in the book. It is about a mentalist named Anton Zelman, and it describes a moment that upended everything Weber expected to see.
Weber was watching Zelman perform. The setting was a room full of people, the kind of audience that could easily become distracted, restless, unconvinced. And Zelman, instead of projecting force, instead of commanding the room with volume and energy and theatrical authority, did something that seemed counterintuitive to the point of recklessness.
He got quiet.
Not quiet as in slightly subdued. Quiet as in practically whispering. His movements became slow, deliberate, economical. His voice dropped to a level where the audience had to strain to hear him. His body stilled. There was a quality to his presence that was almost meditative — a concentrated intensity that seemed to radiate inward rather than outward.
And the room went absolutely silent. Not because Zelman had demanded silence. Not because the material was so spectacular that the audience was struck dumb. Because the quality of his presence was so compelling that the audience could not look away. They were leaning forward, physically leaning, pulled toward this person who was giving them so little and yet somehow communicating so much.
Weber describes watching this and feeling his understanding of performance shift. This was not what commanding a room was supposed to look like. Commanding a room was supposed to involve projection, energy, taking charge. Zelman was doing none of those things. He was doing the opposite. And the audience was more invested, more focused, more completely under his control than they would have been if he had been shouting.
I read this account and I put the book down and sat in my hotel room for a long time, thinking.
What I Thought Command Meant
Before the Zelman story, my mental model of stage command was essentially borrowed from corporate keynote speakers. Project. Fill the room. Own the space. Big gestures, clear voice, eye contact that sweeps the room like a lighthouse. Energy, energy, energy. The more of yourself you put out there, the more of the room you control.
This model is not wrong, exactly. It works for a lot of performers. It works especially well for comedy, for high-energy stage magic, for situations where the performer’s personality is the primary attraction. But it is incomplete. And for mentalism — for the kind of work I have been moving toward, where the effect depends on the audience believing that something impossible is genuinely happening — it may be actively counterproductive.
Because projection says: “Look at me. I am performing for you.” And if you are performing, there is a script. If there is a script, there is a method. If there is a method, this is a trick. The chain of implication runs from high-energy projection straight to “This is entertainment, not reality,” and while that is perfectly fine for some kinds of performance, it is the opposite of what mentalism requires.
Zelman’s approach broke the chain. By being quiet, by being still, by withholding energy rather than projecting it, he communicated something fundamentally different: this is not a show. This is something happening. And I need you to be very, very quiet so that it can happen.
Derren Brown’s Withholding Principle
Reading about Zelman reminded me of a concept I had encountered in Derren Brown’s writing: the power of withholding. Brown argues that the grandeur of performance should be felt rather than seen. The more you hold back, the more the audience feels it. The more you push to the surface, the more it becomes caricature.
Brown uses the analogy of Anthony Hopkins playing Hannibal Lecter. Hopkins is terrifying not because he screams and rages but because he withholds the threat beneath a surface of refined charm. The violence is always implied, never demonstrated, and the implication is far more frightening than the demonstration could ever be. The audience’s imagination fills in the gaps, and the audience’s imagination is more powerful than any special effect.
Applied to magic and mentalism, this principle suggests that the performer who underplays their ability creates a more powerful impression than the performer who overstates it. If you claim loudly to be able to read minds, the audience questions the claim. If you demonstrate something quietly, with no claim at all, and let the impossibility speak for itself in a room so silent that everyone can hear their own breathing, the audience does not question. They experience.
This is what Zelman understood. By getting quiet, he was not diminishing his power. He was amplifying it. He was creating a space where the audience’s imagination could operate without interference. He was trusting them to lean in, to invest, to do the imaginative work of making the experience real. And they did, because that is what human beings do when they are given quiet, concentrated attention and an invitation to be present.
Trying It Myself
I decided to experiment with the Zelman approach at a private event in Vienna. It was a small group — maybe twenty people, seated, post-dinner. Good conditions for intimate work. The kind of room where I would normally use moderate energy and conversational volume.
Instead, I dropped further. For the opening of my mentalism piece, I brought my voice down to just above a whisper. I slowed my movements to about half their normal pace. I made eye contact with individuals — really held it, for two or three seconds each, not the quick scan I usually do. I eliminated all non-essential movement. No pacing. No gestures. Just stillness, eye contact, and a voice that required the audience to listen actively.
The first few seconds were terrifying. The instinct to project, to fill the space, to “perform” was screaming at me. The quiet felt like weakness. The stillness felt like hesitation. Every trained habit in my body was fighting the approach.
And then I felt the room shift.
It was not gradual. It was a distinct moment, maybe ten seconds in, when the quality of the audience’s attention changed. They went from watching me to being absorbed by me. From passive observation to active investment. I could feel the attention become physical — a pressure in the room, a focus so concentrated it was almost tangible.
I held it. I stayed in the lower gear. I performed the entire mentalism piece at this quiet, concentrated level. The reveal — the moment of impossibility — happened in near-silence. I did not announce it. I did not sell it. I just let it become apparent, and the audience saw it, and the reaction was a collective intake of breath followed by absolute stillness, followed by applause that started slowly and built.
It was the strongest audience response I had received in months. And I had achieved it by doing less than I had ever done. Less volume, less movement, less energy. But more presence. More intention. More of whatever quality it is that makes one person in a room impossible to ignore.
Fitzkee’s Staircase and the Soft Step
There is a principle in Dariel Fitzkee’s writing about never descending from a level once gained. An act should be like a staircase, always rising, never dropping back. This principle is important and true, but the Zelman approach reveals a nuance within it.
A step does not have to be louder than the previous step to be higher. A step can be quieter than the previous step and still be higher — if the quiet carries more intensity, more weight, more significance. A whispered revelation after a passage of normal speech is not a descent. It is an escalation of a different kind. The staircase rises not in volume but in density. In gravity. In the quality of the audience’s engagement.
This is what makes the soft approach so powerful for climactic moments. The audience expects the climax to be the biggest, loudest, most energetic moment. When instead it is the quietest — the most still, the most intimate — the violation of expectation creates a disorientation that amplifies the impact. The audience is prepared for spectacle and receives instead a moment of such concentrated reality that it bypasses all their defenses.
I have started building this into my set structure deliberately. The early material runs at normal performance energy. As the set progresses and the effects become more significant, the energy does not increase. It decreases. The room gets quieter. My movements get smaller. My voice drops. The audience, trained by a lifetime of entertainment to expect escalation through loudness, finds instead escalation through silence. And the silence hits harder than any volume ever could.
The Practical Mechanics
Performing quietly requires specific technical adjustments that I had not anticipated.
First, diction becomes critical. When you are projecting at normal performance volume, slight imprecisions in your speech are masked by the energy. When you are nearly whispering, every consonant matters. If the audience has to strain to hear you, they will tolerate it only if what they hear is crystal clear. Mumbled whispers are not mysterious — they are frustrating.
Second, stillness requires physical control that casual performance does not. When you are moving, the audience’s eye follows the motion and does not notice small fidgets. When you are standing still, every micro-movement is visible. A shifting weight, a nervous hand, a darting eye — all of these become enormously conspicuous against a backdrop of deliberate stillness. I have had to develop a physical discipline around quiet performance that is, paradoxically, more demanding than my normal performance mode.
Third, timing changes completely. When you are speaking quickly, a two-second pause feels like a beat. When you are speaking slowly, a two-second pause feels like nothing. To create the same impact at a slower pace, you need pauses that would feel uncomfortable at normal speed — four seconds, five seconds, even longer. Learning to hold these pauses without filling them has been one of the more challenging performance skills I have developed.
Ralphie May talks about this in his comedy masterclass. He describes silence as one of the most versatile tools in a performer’s toolkit — a pause before a punchline builds anticipation, a pause after builds impact, and the willingness to hold silence while an audience processes is what separates professionals from amateurs. He is talking about comedy, but the principle transfers directly to magic. In both disciplines, the performer who can hold silence owns the room.
The Power Dynamic
There is something about quiet performance that fundamentally alters the power dynamic between performer and audience. In a normal performance, the performer is sending and the audience is receiving. The performer projects energy, words, movement, and the audience absorbs it. The relationship is one-directional: performer to audience.
When the performer gets quiet, the audience has to reach. They have to lean in, listen harder, pay closer attention. The relationship becomes bidirectional. The audience is not passively receiving anymore — they are actively participating, investing effort in the experience. And investment creates attachment. An audience that has worked to pay attention values the experience more than an audience that has been served the experience on a platter.
This is why the Zelman approach works so powerfully: it transforms the audience from passive receivers into active participants. They are not watching a show. They are part of something happening. The quiet commands their involvement in a way that volume cannot.
What I Have Learned About Myself
The Zelman experiment revealed something about my own performance habits that I had not recognized. My default mode — projecting, filling the space, maintaining constant energy — was partly a defense mechanism. As long as I was putting energy out, I did not have to feel exposed. The energy was a buffer between me and the audience, a constant stream of output that kept the vulnerability at bay.
Getting quiet stripped that buffer away. In the silence, in the stillness, I was more exposed than I had ever been on stage. There was nothing between me and the audience — no patter, no movement, no energetic projection. Just a person, standing still, looking at other people, in a room that was very, very quiet.
It was uncomfortable. And it was powerful. Not just for the audience. For me.
Because in that quiet, something happened that my normal performance mode never permitted: I actually connected with the people in front of me. Not through the mediation of script and routine and performance energy. Directly. Person to person. Eyes to eyes. In the silence, I could feel the audience not as a group to be managed but as individuals to be met. And they could feel me — not the performing version, not the consultant-turned-magician character, but the person underneath.
This is what I think Zelman had mastered. Not a technique. A way of being. An ability to stand in front of a room full of strangers and be so completely present, so fully there, that the audience had no choice but to be present with him. The softness was not weakness. It was the most honest form of strength.
Where This Takes Pillar Four
The Weber framework says: control every moment. The Zelman revelation adds: the most powerful form of control is the kind you do not force. The room is most completely yours when you are quietest, most still, most apparently surrendering the conventional tools of authority.
This sounds paradoxical. It is paradoxical. And it is true.
I have not abandoned projection. I have not become a whispering minimalist. There are moments in my show that call for energy, for volume, for taking charge of the space in the conventional sense. But I now have a second register — a quiet register — that I can access when the moment demands it. And when I access it, the room belongs to me in a way that no amount of projection could achieve.
The Anton Zelman moment taught me that command is not about force. It is about presence. And presence, at its deepest, is not something you project outward. It is something you hold within yourself, so completely and so confidently, that the audience is drawn toward it the way objects are drawn toward gravity.
You do not need to shout to be heard. You need to be worth listening to. And sometimes the surest way to demonstrate that you are worth listening to is to speak so softly that the audience has to come to you.