#psycrets

A blustery November Saturday saw Psycrets return to Hitchin for its sixteenth Tabula Mentis, subtitled Entangled Minds.

Opening the day’s lectures was Atlas Brookings, whose ‘Train Tracking’ has been one of the biggest and most exciting releases to happen in Mentalism for some time. Not trains running  today, though! Instead Atlas treated us to a number of other naked mentalist techniques that he uses, including his signature superhero divination effect.

Most valuable, though, was an insight into how Brookings chooses to present progressive anagrams, a technique I know many people shy away from for its apparent transparency. His handling of them shows a deep understanding of their weaknesses and so he is able instead to create effects that make absolute sense, and are capable of deep astonishment.

Looch set a conversational tone which happily remained for the rest of the day. He included in his lecture a number of confessional accounts of when things have gone wrong for him, showing how bad experiences are often what we need in order to become better performers, better businessmen, and even better people. This led to several members offering their own horror stories.

He was also keen to demonstrate that the simplest way of improving one’s performance is to keep in mind that it should always be about your audience. More weaknesses in method were patched up in Looch’s talk too, as he provided a wonderfully simple way of improving a technique with business cards, again by taking an illogical practice and changing it to make it make perfect sense.

After lunch we were treated to a live rendition of Stephen Young’s incomparable Yorkshire Christmas. There’s also a version of it on YouTube should curiosity get the better of you.

We then moved a couple of counties along as we were treated to the mind-reading styling of Newcastle’s Michael Murray. Starting off with a performance of his version of Out Of This World using a borrowed shuffled deck, he went on to outline a number of principles that he uses to rationalise process, to build rapport, and to use non-verbal communication as a means of creating false mistakes. Murray spoke at length, at speed and with passion, ably demonstrating why he has a reputation for being one of UK mentalism’s most prodigious thinkers.

Marc Spelman finished the day off with another generous talk. There’s a word that Marc uses quite a lot, which is “dynamic” and the more you learn about his thinking the more you see its importance, to not think solely in terms of method or effect but actually the framing, sensibility and, yes, dynamic of an effect that can be used both to bury the method and to create an emotional weight that might not otherwise exist.

On 29th March a shadow of mystery performers descended upon the faded imperial glory of Birmingham's Paragon hotel, there to attend the 15th Tabula Mentis, entitled Inductive Reasoning.

Marc Salem opened the day with what he described as a range of "rants, tirades, words of advice, and tricks." He gave us a stern reminder that what we were about, more than anything, was keeping secrets, and so the secrets he shared on the day ought to remain just that. Highlights included a remarkably clean Add A Number, and an inspired method for getting a spectator to divine which hand you're hiding something in using a pendulum. He also spoke about the structuring of mentalism acts, that they cannot follow the "climb, dip and climb" structure of a conventional magic act, but must, in effect, build relentlessly to a final, big closer.

A real treat followed Marc's lecture, as we were lucky enough to have Brian Barnes demonstrate his version of Al Koran's blindfold act. I hope I'm not giving too much away by saying that the blindfold in use for the act is genuine. It's an act that Brian has been doing for fifty years, and was an absolute joy to watch. The logic of the proceedings, the natural moments at which the truth of the blindfold was demonstrated, the tense excitement of the performer as he awaited confirmation that he had found the correct card, or correctly estimated the number of cards one of his participants had cut, all made for a genuine spectacle.

Stephen Young was up next, demonstrating his photo-psyche cards. Stephen has put together a broad collection of photographs to be put to reading purposes. Using the provocative idea that readings should be carried out with photos rather than tarot cards, Stephen talked us through the benefits of a system that had no esoteric baggage, could be placed firmly in a psychological framework, and allowed an easy way into an intuitive and interrogative process that I suspect won't replace the tarot but will certainly find a home with readers of the right hue. We were also treated to a whistle-stop tour of his Pict-ionage system, which seemed well suited to remote viewing and control condition style presentations.

Things then started getting a bit Conan Doyle as Ben Cardall introduced us to his approach to mentalism. Those familiar with his work will know that Cardall presents feats of deduction, and his lecture was a window into this world. I think the highlight of his talk for me was the rapid divination of someone's starsign, followed by an "off by two" hit on their date of birth. It's fascinating to watch the development of methods that seem more and more to resemble the kinds of skills mentalists have hitherto only claimed to use.

Which is the perfect segue, really, for the closing lecture from the inestimable Peter Turner. Allowing himself a free format for his lecture, he essentially took requests from those in attendance. He dazzled first with two ACAAN variants, one of which was explained, but the other, performed with a borrowed deck, where two participants both thought of the same playing card and the same number, where the card was, indeed, found at the correct position, seemed truly remarkable. My thoughts at the time, having seen the same effect used on a recent web interview with Turner, and hearing that similar performances had lit up well-known magic forums, was "no-one can be that lucky!" Turner was nothing short of generous in the methods that he tipped, and, again, his methodology seems on a par with the effects. The way in which his name divination works was remarkable enough, but his PIN divination is something else!

On the ninth of November, Psycrets descended once again onto the HItchin Priory for its fourteenth meeting of minds, Tabula Mentis. It's a testament to the skills of the organisers that an event that offered such a wide range of thought and discipline, a programme that included everything from guided meditation to some sneaky stationery, never seemed less than cohesive.

After Dr Landman kicked things off with a brief demonstration of new effect the Ring of Gyges Peter Campbell Wells talked to the group about his experiences performing for several years at the Edinburgh Fringe. The Fringe is a big draw for performers, but its notoriety for the vast range of shows and average audience sizes purported to be in single figures makes it a somewhat daunting prospect. Learning of Peter’s experiences helps put that into perspective. Performing at the “Free Fringe”, which is essentially busking indoors, his approach has been to use his runs to develop commercial shows. I think the take home message of the talk overall is that you should consider doing Edinburgh only if you have specific things you want to get from the experience, and only if that specific thing isn’t money. It is possible to make money at the fringe but it is not the norm.   

Next up was a talk by Nick Hobson on the Psycards deck he created in the 1980s with the help of illustrator Maggie Kneen. We started with a demonstration of one of the system’s strengths. Each attendee was handed an unseen card and guided by reader Nusa Horvat into meditation. Once in a relaxed state we were to think on a question in our lives, and then look at the card. This is the real power of the cards, that without any kind of formal tutelage in the symbolism used in the cards, it was possible to see in them some form of meaning pertaining to our questions. This is, for what it’s worth, what I think the reading process really is. The sitter contemplates a set of symbols and relates them to aspects of their own life. That is not to reduce what I find a truly fascinating process, merely to state that I don’t think it is particularly other worldly. The ethics of giving readings only really starts getting sticky when the oracle is granted authority or if the reader gives advice. A reading ought to carry the same weight as a conversation had with a stranger. But that’s a discussion for another time!

I was put in mind of Stephen Young’s PhotoPsyche cards, a wealth of rich photographic imagery that, like Psycards, takes a step away from the “spookiness” of the Tarot or similar, older systems, and is well worth checking out.

Jim Cameron spoke next, on the subject of eye imagery in mentalism and beyond, and how he uses mentalism in his work. I’m dutybound not to say what that work is, but the talk as a whole was witty and knowledgeable.

Luke Jermay gave us his second full lecture for the group. He has said previously that the tricks that he lectures are only ever there to illustrate a point he wants to make about the craft. If that is the case then this was Luke Jermay unbound. With the exception of a lovely and effective bit towards the end, Jermay spoke solely about the philosophy he has brought to his own work in order to ensure that he has a unique proposition for the paying public. A highlight of the talk was an audio clip of Derren Brown speaking to an interviewer about his forthcoming show, except it wasn’t Brown but another performer. Jermay pondered whether the artist had actually trained his voice to sound more like the king of the hill, and whether such acts would make more money if they actually promoted themselves as a Derren Brown tribute act.

Jermay set out to make his show as different from Brown’s work as possible, and spoke of how, once he had established what his show was about, that decision allowed him to quickly select material, and solve scripting problems and the like. It’s been interesting watching Jermay develop following his return to the UK and he is fast becoming one of mentalism’s deepest thinkers.

Headlining the day, though, was Christian Cagigal’s performance of his remarkable show Now, And On The Hour. We were a little disappointed to learn that he wouldn’t be lecturing the effects from the show, but the reason for this became clear very quickly. In terms of method there was next to nothing that would not be known to most of the people in the room (though I still couldn’t follow his ACR!). However, his hour is extremely powerful.

He had been asked to condense a two-hour show down into an hour for a run in New York, but the he found the process difficult, reducing the show but still keeping it a show. The audience focused in on one particular effect, and the attendant presentation which involved his father, a Vietnam vet, and his discussions on topics such as telepathy and time travel. The audience wanted to hear more about Christian’s father, but Christian didn’t want to talk more about it. But finally he relented, and the result, a remarkably open and unflinching autobiographical show that retains its original theme of time travel, but does something heartbreakingly optimistic with it. We will often talk about how important it is to make a particular effect personal to the participant, but we tend to overlook what can be achieved when we make an effect personal to ourselves.

At the top end of the show, Cagigal asks  “Do you ever get that feeling that what you’re experiencing now has already happened, and that it will happen again?” It’s a great moment because it reflects not only the show’s central conceit, that the character of the performer is trapped in a single hour, ritualistically acting out the same tricks, the same memories, but also that the real Cagigal must do the same (until, he admits, he can no longer find the emotional strength to do it). Lastly, it reflects the cycles of behaviour that Cagigal relates in his past, the circles we travel in that ultimately serve to harm ourselves and those that we love, but remain difficult to break out of. There was a lot of manly sniffing going on by the end.

Cagigal will be immortalising the show in a film that intersperses the performance itself with conversations with collaborators of Cagigal, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing it.

The other side of the Tabula Mentis meetings is, of course, meeting up with fellow travellers. With the day over, we repaired to a couple of Hitchin’s alehouses, to unpack all we had taken on board through the day, to share whatever effects we were currently working with (Choked may have come into play at one point!), and generally just share in our curious belongingness.

I'm pleased and honoured to say that I have an effect in the Psycrets volume Liber Mentis, which is available for purchase here.

Psycrets is a society of Mystery Entertainers run by Todd Landman, Roni Sachnaey and Steve Drury. It organises biannual lectures from leading luminaries that are open to all and well worth getting along to. The book celebrates the society's fifth year and includes contributions from the following:

David Berglas Todd Landman Roni Shachnaey Steve Drury Docc Hilford Banachek Enrique Enriquez Scott Grossberg Sheila Lyon Alan Jones Bob Percy Dale Shrimpton Dan Baines Daniele Nigris Dee Christopher Derek Heron Steve Murray Freddie Valentine Atlas Brookings Arthur Emerson Harry Lucas Iain Dunford Iain Jay Marc Paul Jon Thompson Madelon Hoedt Nik Taylor Paul Voodini Professor BC Rainer Mees Thomas Heine Nico Heinrich Ramon Fauria Ray Doetjes Rob Chapman Rob Lupine Roger Curzon Simon Scott Simon Shaw Stephen Ward Tom Lauten Barrie Richardson Barry Cooper Lara Ruth