Humanistic Performance

A simple model of understanding the performance of mystery arts.

Pablo Amirá

I’m very glad to contribute a few of my ideas and realizations about

mystery arts with you and I thank Richard and Neal for that. Neal´s and
Richard´s work for me was and is an eye-opener that motivates me to push
the limits of the profound mystery that we as performer can create.

My base of thinking behind any mystery art (magic, mentalism, bizzarism,

readings, etc.) is very simple: “do it the best you can, focused completely
on their own personal experience”.

In my style to perceive mentalism and readings isn’t the best idea to

directly claim psychic abilities, rather I prefer to create mystery and leave
my audience and participants to make their own conclusion using their own
beliefs and personal experiences to label my performance. The word
“psychic” can mislabel your work and can create unnecessary resistance for
your performance (at least in my experience happens that).

My desire result whenever I share with other a performance is give him a

moment of entertaining mystery and a memory for the rest or their life and
this model of approaching performance it’s my way to accomplish this.

My inspiration comes from various thoughts (mystery arts, theater,

psychology, philosophy and other places), but the most important is from
Carl Roger´s writings about psychotherapy.

Since I was a child I had interest in communication, performing and

connecting with people. I will be a psychologist in a couple of years so I
study different theories and aspects of this practice. With all this I discover
several powerful concepts and ideas that can be important for your own
development and understanding.

Maybe for some this will thoughts will be very intuitive, but it´s always
necessary to create conscious awareness of unconscious knowledge to
create better insights.
Carl Rogers defines a correct environment for psychotherapy in 3 specific
conditions:

1. Empathy: Be inside the mind and see thru the eyes of the client. See
the world like him and as popular wisdom says: “put yourself in the shoes
of others”

2. Unconditional Positive Regard: Without prejudge, accept the other.

3. Congruence/ Genuinity: A real interest about your client.

Now, what if we change the word “psychotherapy” by “performance” or

“reading” and “client” by participant?

Obviously our performance isn’t a therapy session but I believe that

applying these modified concepts to our art can create powerful moment for
our participants that can be beneficial for them. With this attitudinal
predisposition towards your participant, the performance will be centered on
him rather on you and with that, allow him to feel good.

We can learn several theoretical tools to enhance our own performance

such as NLP concepts (engage your communication skills in a visual,
auditory and kinesthetic way to cover all possible paths to really being a
successful communicator, be aware of your verbal and non verbal language,
etc) but if you analyze those 3 simple conditions that Rogerian Therapy give
us, at the end they are not based on pure knowledge that you have to learn
from books, rather just an internal and external attitude and a
predisposition to accept the human that is in front of you in an honest and
genuine caring way understanding that he is person with the same
insecurities as you that wants to live something special for his life.

Being empathic isn’t just a natural gift that comes with your own
personality, rather an ability that can be sharpened thru experience and
really start to communicate with as much persons as you can, trying always
to connect with them and see the world with their eyes. Let him know that
will all be fine and that short moment of sharing will not embarrass him or
something like that. In that way you participant will feel your true attitude
towards him.

Also it´s essential in this model to see the participant as a valid person to
share with me on that precise moment. Let him know with your verbal and
non verbal communication that even when he “commits a mistake”,
everything can be fixed and that the performance isn’t a rigid dynamic,
rather something that both performer and participant create.
Let’s see now one of the most important aspects on this approach, about be
genuine. But how on earth we “learn to be genuine”? That´s kind of a
paradox, right?

Well at the beginning you will need to amplify the natural positive attitude
that you have for your participant (even when isn’t too much). After that
you can focus on that single positive part and start from there. Several
times I work in places where some members of my audience aren’t
cooperative or just don’t really care about the performance. In this
moments it`s very hard to genuine care about other if the caring isn’t
reciprocal, but whenever I push hard in an intelligent way, I see good
results.

But don’t try to be Mr. Nice. That could be very negative towards your goal
and can create resistance. Find the correct balance.

For me the solution of all this comes from our vocation as performer. Not
everyone can be a performer and that natural desire to be and share with
people whatever you share in your own performance needs to move you to
be genuine.

A therapist maybe enjoys seeing people improve their lives, or resolve some
issues, becoming better human beings. Maybe us as performers can enjoy
the mystery that we can create and see thanks to our participants or any
other personal goal that you have as artist.

Now, let’s face it, our EGO is strong and it´s very difficult to don’t ask for
attention and apparently with this “participant centered performance” you
will not receive the applause and attention that you want. My personal
experience when applying all this ideas on performance told me that IT
DOESN’T MATTER.

It doesn’t matter because you will still gaining recognition as a miracle

worker for the simple fact that without you this awesome paranormal thing
can not being done or perceived.

So when you read minds, you center all the attention in how good is your
participant to send thoughts and visualize in his mind, but at the end your
audience will give you credit for your abilities (real, theatrical or both).

Let’s take a simple example of this model, applied to a simple effect,

predicting one selected object amongst a group.

One way, (the extreme pole of this approach) is performing this effect with
the focus on the prediction and the arrival to a success thanks to the
abilities of the performer without any other artistic motivation rather to just
show-off.
Who is on the center of the entire event? You as performer.

What if our prediction of a selected object on the table isn’t about us as the
great mindreaders, rather them and their intuition and how they with their
powerful imagination/unconscious or whatever premise are you using, could
perceive the written object?

What if you use some playing cards, tarot cards, ESP cards or 7 Chakra
stones and give your performance and interesting inherent meaningful
power finishing the process with a reading about the predicted object?

Who is the center of that entire event? Your participant. He is on the center
of attention; you are just conducting the mysterious event that will occur.

In here your artistic motivation is presented and can be interpreted by your

participant during or after the performance. He could thing this rationally or
irrational, by that I mean that of course that will feel mystery about the fact
of the prediction, but also for all the abstract process that happens. He will
think about his decision, about what could happen if he changed the
decision, and how things connect meaningfully.

Each person will create different realization thanks to the simple fact that
each human is different and we can see the same event with different
perspective. Let them fill the gaps and create their own thoughts.

We normally talk a lot during performances, right? And we need to do it to

present our premise and perform. But I motivate you that little by little let
them talk more.

Obviously using common sense and good routining without leaving death
spots during the performance, but giving them some attention that can
really relief you as “center of attention”, and let them wonder not just about
you , but also the external mystery that can be experienced. When we start
to really listen people and get inspired by them, we can learn a lot as artist.
Remember that we have 2 ears and 1 mouth for a reason.

In that way one more time your performance will be a “participant centered
performance” and not just a “performer centered performance”, one that
could be resisted.

Maybe this model will not suit everyone for the simple reason that there are
some context in which your performance will not be seeing with some of the
presuppositions that I take on here (loud environments where you can’t
really talk with someone and connect with them), but I know that you can
grasp a single idea that could serve you for your own development as artist.
If this entire essay creates on you a single thought or idea, my goal is
accomplished.
As you can see, we can take these 3 simple steps of personal setup/self
programming and I can assure you can entertain and leave an interesting
mysterious experience for anyone, anytime. Isn’t about the effect at the
end, is about you and how you can focus the power on them and with that
create mysterious events

If you want to learn more about powerful mentalism on these lines I can
obviously recommend you to get the work from Richard Webster, Neal
Scryer and also Jerome Finley and Luca Volpe.

Thanks for taking the time to read this ideas. Anything that you want just
contact me and I will try to get in touch with you as soon as I can

Blessings.

Pablo Amirá

www.mentalismcenter.com