Tabula Mentis XIV: Lateral Mentalism
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.
These meetings always leave me energised and inspired, and I can’t wait for my next fix in March.
