Performing Arts Series hosts ThoughtControl
February 18, 2010 1:01 PM
There’s nothing better than a good magic show. Audience volunteers get sawed in half and then miraculously put back together, doves appear out of thin air, and the host of the show demonstrates powers that appear to have been channeled from the underworld.
What’s even better is a magic show that does not describe itself as “magic” at all.
On February 14, the Antigonish Performing Arts Series hosted Thomas Baxter’s ThoughtControl at the Immaculata auditorium. ThoughtControl isn’t your typical “magic” show experience.
Instead, it is probably the most persuasive argument why you should get a degree in psychology, if only to mess with people’s minds and get paid for doing it.
Baxter described the show as a series of psychological experiments that proves, or as least provides the illusion, that he can control an audience member’s thoughts.
Before the show began, Baxter milled around the crowd, demonstrating some simple card tricks that ran along the lines of “I bet I can guess what card you are holding.” His keen eye for tells makes this trick one of the simplest to understand but also one of the hardest to replicate yourself.
Baxter teased the audience by describing exactly how some tricks are done by pointing out how a volunteer’s body language reveals their card.
However, even with this knowledge, the audience is still at a loss to determine how he picks up on these minute characteristics within a short period of time and without ever having met anyone in the room.
The show eventually started with Baxter calling a volunteer up from the audience. He asked the volunteer to think of three different simple words, which he would be able to guess with his otherworldly “psychic” abilities.
The first word was a letter from the alphabet, and Baxter was able to determine it as the letter “G” after saying the alphabet backwards and catching some revealing body language.
The second word was a name that Baxter guessed as “Ellen” but it was actually “Eldon” (although he said that it was close enough).
Finally, he correctly guessed the name of the city the volunteer was thinking of, Vancouver, without any problems. This was a really nice warm-up to get the audience acquainted with Baxter for an evening of psychological thrills and wonder.
For those students who missed out on the show, you missed out on a chance to win $1,000, and all that you would have had to do was pick one of two packages.
Although this seems simple in theory, Baxter threw a twist by turning over the two folders, one with the label “Pick me!” and the other labeled “Not me!” After that, he asked the volunteer to turn towards the audience while he told us which one he wanted the volunteer to pick, which was the “Pick me!” package.
Of course, he realized that the audience had all looked over at the “Pick me!” package, and that the volunteer had observed us doing so, but he boasted that it was all a part of the act and that he was using reverse-reverse psychology, or something along those lines.
Confused about which package to pick? Well, if you were like the volunteer, you would’ve picked the “Pick me!” package, which unfortunately did not contain the cheque for $1,000 but the consolation prize of a lucky lottery ticket picked by Baxter himself.
Perhaps the best illusion of the evening was the one Baxter said was an outright trick that involved deception rather than psychological manipulation. However, this one is the most difficult to explain and he did not reveal to the audience how it was done.
A couple both sat in different chairs, and while Baxter waved a piece of tissue paper in front of the man’s face, the woman jumped up and screamed as if the chair had stabbed her. Baxter even got them to switch seats, but the same thing happened.
Finally, he told the woman to hold onto a chair, and to her surprise she found that she couldn’t remove her hands. It was an experience to behold, really giving Baxter’s assertion that he can control our thoughts and bodies an eerie and frightening example.
For the finale, Baxter tried an experiment that he had not done before, to admittedly mixed results. The premise of the illusion was that he was going to have two individuals imagine that they were in a movie theatre and then they would describe what they saw to him.
The conclusion of the trick was that Baxter revealed a ripped page from a novel that was supposed to describe everything that they had seen in their imaginations.
However, the volunteers had different suggestions that didn’t correspond with the hidden description, so the act ended the show on a relatively anticlimactic note.
It is brave for a performer to try and attempt a new trick in front of a live audience, but it would have been nice if he had saved another impressive experiment to follow it. Throughout the night, a man was lifted into the air by three women and Baxter with just their index fingers, a volunteer was able to read another volunteer’s mind and correctly guess her card, and one woman felt Baxter touch her on the shoulder even though he never did so at all. The evening was an engaging mix of thrills, entertainment, and a little bit of mystery. For those who think that magic shows are just for children, you were tricked into missing out on a great event.
