Why I perform Mentalism

“You made me cry with joy”

Revealing a random word from a book

This week I performed 3 formal shows of mentalism and several informal ones. After one show a woman walked up to me as I was packing my things away and told me about her terrible, terrible week. She’s a new Canadian and is still adapting to her adopted country.

She said my show (and one thing in particular) had transported her away from life’s everyday challenges back to a childlike state of wonder and awe. She felt like a child laughing at everything. And she thanked me for brining a little magic into her life.

It’s the reaction, the gasp, the laugh, the wide-eyed look of astonishment. These immediate, powerful emotional reactions from the audience are incredibly rewarding for me as a performer. Bringing a moment of joy and wonder to someone is an amazing feeling.

Magic is also an intellectual challenge. Developing an effect is a complex intellectual puzzle. I have to research not only the secret method but also the perfect staging, timing, and psychological cues to completely divorce the effect (what the audience sees) from the method (how it's actually done). Making miracles is hard work. Good magic is often more about psychology than dexterity. Magicians take pleasure in understanding and exploiting the limits of human attention, memory, and perception through techniques like misdirection and suggestion.

In short, I perform because I love making people feel something incredible—a delightful confusion that the laws of physics have been broken, if only for a few seconds.