(Taken from my book "Simply Mental")
I define Mentalism as the mystery performance art in which the performer (Mentalist) entertains his audience with
an act based in interesting mind related abilities.
For me Mentalism is not a “branch
of Magic” as one school of thought says, rather they are allied mystery
performance art. The same as a painter and a sculptor. They have sometime
similar tools, but at the core and the end result is different. For me
Mentalism needs to be credible, for that reason I don’t go with astronomical predictions
or coincidence effects.
I love being “simple” the approach of Mentalism. By
that I took routes that sometimes takes boldness and minimalism. I love being
able to create mysteries with simple props, simple well covered methods using
most importantly, my own charisma as performer.
For me Mentalism is a way of communication, it is not
the end result, rather sometimes just the extra cherry of mystery on top of the
complete experience in which the most important is the human to human
connection that I want to create with my participant and audiences. At the end
of the day, I don’t care if they remember the particular details of the
routine, rather they can have a good emotional memory. For this same reason
most of my routines doesn’t achieve incredible results in comparison to others,
because I don’t like to be incredible. Let me explain this. If we see the
etymological root of “incredible” is literally “not credible”, which is
something that I don’t explore. I want to create credible experiences of mystery
(not a belief in myself as psychic). I want to achieve a memorable,
interesting, entertaining, mysterious and amazing moment for my audience.
A
difficult task, nonetheless satisfying when is reached...
CONVERSATION