Momentous Oddities – PDF

Description

In 2012 we lectured in London talking about “Sense and Meaning”.

The point of our presentation was that we felt that too many mentalism performances could be characterized as an inappropriate demonstration of arbitrariness or “whateverism”. It seemed to us that there were too many meaningless effects and presentations which barely scratched the surface of the audience’s minds or, more importantly, their emotions, when in fact we should be exploring them to their innermost depths – or at least the performance should appear to do so.

In the “Sense and Meaning” lecture we provided several premises and ideas on how to make routines more meaningful but we held back from revealing specific details as to how this might be done. In our “Momentous Oddities” lecture we will now keep the reasons for our intention brief but provide some effects that illustrate how we might go about establishing that meaningful emotional connection. We have decided to focus on two particular themes which we feel work well in this regard: added value for classic effects and tools for truly intuitive personal readings.

Performed properly both these themes can be personally meaningful to the performer as well as to the participant and even for the audience as a whole. Because we entrust something private and personally meaningful to our audiences we draw them into an emotional relationship with us. In other words, the openness of our feeling gets reciprocated by their openness to the experience. Our starting point of Part I will be to gather together some nostalgic stories, each of them possessing an air of vague melancholia. After that we will choreograph various effects to match that mood. This will produce a set of experiences which take on a very different appearance and feel in their outcome and impact from their traditional performance.

We aim to show how mentalism effects can be adjusted to support the primary objective of meaningful presentation. That said, the effects that we have combined in our lecture are not the only ones we would perform during a show. That would be emotionally burdensome and potentially tedious for the audience. Not only that, but the premise or effects would not be appropriate for every kind of performance or type of venue. Indeed they might be deemed completely inappropriate if you were performing in a corporate setting or in the context of a trade show, for example.

If you keep that in mind as you study our routines then we are sure that you’ll find something inspiring within the pages of this booklet. In our experience any of these effects performed as a stand-alone piece is strong enough to help you build a reputation as a sensitive, emotional and empathic performer. If this is already a facet of your personality, or one you would like to develop, then you have the tools right here to help you grow.

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