 I recently read a comment on a magic forum as part of a long thread in response to the question:
“Do people truly believe in mentalism anymore?” After a lot of interesting and constructive comments one person decided to answer with this, “Come on guys, give it a rest. Perhaps you’ve convinced yourself that your cold reading techniques are real mind reading? Of course there will be some that believe you’re genuine but they’ve lost the plot just like you have.” Obviously not very constructive but then as I stated in a previous post "You Don't Believe In Magic" I feel that as a magician, you should attempt to create the illusion that you believe the magic you are performing is real, this technique is called acting. And that is why I feel Mentalism in its purist form presented as entertainment, is as close to real magic as you are going to get. When I was eight years old my favourite show on TV was the magician staring Bill Bixby and I knew by the age of ten that all I wanted out of life was for people to believe I could do real magic. I started with silk handkerchiefs and boxes, moved on to doves (when I was 13 I wanted to be Channing Pollock), then came the escapology and then cards and close up stuff and years of performing sponge balls and ambitious card routines to less than ecstatic audiences, in restaurants and pubs, on and on it went. But no matter how much I practiced, no matter how original my presentations became and no matter how much my audience enjoyed what they saw, I never felt that what I was doing was perceived as anything more than clever tricks. Then in 1990 when I was running my two man stage show around the Midlands in the UK, I picked up my old copy of The Amateur Magicians Handbook by Henry Hay and turned to the section on Mentalism, from that moment my understanding of real magic changed. Decades later and some people will disagree with what I am about to say and that is their right, those performers who feel the need to display a disclaimer when they work will no doubt, accuse me of preying on an unsuspecting public, once again that is their right, however I believe that the closest you can get to performing pure mentalism (even as entertainment) and therefore real magic, is to learn a good classic reading system and incorporate it into your act. I have tried astrology but it seems to me that in an entertainment environment many people associate star signs with what is written weekly in the newspaper. I tried the Runes but wasn’t comfortable with them, I have tried palmistry and still do a bit now and then, and I have studied numerology but regularly encountered the following question, ‘how can adding numbers together tell me about my life?’ Finally about 25 years ago I settled on the Tarot Cards. For me they represent all that is essential for a believable demonstration of mentalism and psychic ability. An air of mystery, plenty of symbolism and more importantly eye candy for your audience. To those of you out there who say it isn’t possible to incorporate Tarot cards in a display of modern mentalism, I say you are wrong, and I say that from experience. For over ten years my one hour cabaret act started with a display of mind reading using playing cards, moved on to a blindfold routine, then a spoon bending routine, followed by my version of fourth dimensional telepathy. I closed the act by explaining what the tarot are and how they are used and then did a multiple mind reading/psychic reading effect using just the 22 major cards, 5 – 10 members of the audience and a bucket load of nerve. This last tarot routine seems to be the one which convinced my audiences that my show, which is entertaining, funny in parts and explores the possibilities of the human mind, is accomplished by psychic means and not by trickery. I am comfortable with this belief, after all belief has always been my aim whenever I have performed and has been since I was ten years old. Now of course not everybody will be convinced and I make no actual psychic claims during my performance, but I find it interesting that as a performer of magic tricks for twenty years prior to embracing what I call “Pure Mentalism”, I never got approached after a show by anybody who wanted to regale me with tales of relatives or friends who could genuinely de-materialise and re-appear in another location. On the other hand as a psychic entertainer (and the emphasis is on entertainment), I have lost count of the number of times I have performed my cabaret act only to be approached by people from all walks of life, who congratulate me on my gift and then tell me their own stories about their psychic mother, aunt, great grandfather etc. So who am I to shatter their illusions? Here’s the thing, in order to be perceived as the real deal you need to suspend your own disbelief, at least for the duration of your performance, remember you are an actor playing the part of a mentalist, and as far as I can remember at no point during his portrayal of Henry V did Laurence Olivier stop mid-speech, wink at the camera and say “I’m not really Henry”. So if you start your mentalism act with a disclaimer or drop Hippity Hoppity rabbits in the middle for the kids, that suspension of disbelief will be destroyed (for you and the majority of your audience) and you will once again be perceived as Joe Blogs doing clever puzzles. When it comes to incorporating a reading system like the Tarot into your mentalism show, here is my advice. If you are comfortable with the cards you use, understand the classic meanings of the individual images, use your common sense and trust your intuition during performance, then you don’t actually need to do any form of trickery when presenting the readings, even from the stage. Do it for long enough, gain experience and a decent level of competence and you may be surprised by the number of people you perform for who actually believe. Who knows, eventually you may too. I’ll leave you with a quote from one of my all-time favourite magic authors. “WHY DO SO MANY MAGICIANS ACTUALLY HATE THE IDEA OF REAL MAGIC? I SUSPECT THAT THEY ARE AFRAID OF IT – SCARED – DOWNRIGHT TERRIFIED. THAT IS WHY THEY KEEP REPEATING, IT’S ONLY A TRICK …. IT’S ONLY A TRICK’ - TONY “DOC” SHEILS. Comments are closed.
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