I've been doing magic for 4 years, and I've been taking it seriously for 3. But in the past 3-4 months I've been looking into mentalism. I now own "13 steps to mentalism" and "Pratical Mental Magic". And I am in freakin love with mentalsim now. It is so incredible. When I performed my first Mentalsim effect, I felt the same way when I performed my first magic effect. The reason these are magic and mentalsim are so much different is: Most of the time when I perform magic, peole are suching for the secret. Ex. (Where's the coin at? I know you put it somewhere. How did the card get in my pocket? You had to put it in there) But with mentalsim it's different. When you tell them a word they're thinking of, or you tell them more about thereselves than they seem to know, or when you can send numbers through telekines. They can't say, things like the example above. You read their minds! That's it. There's explanations for it.
I apologize for making you read some much. I'm just excited about this subject. LOL. So I ask, which do you like better, magic or mentalism? I look forward to hearing replies.
Hey man, I'm glad you got 'bitten'! I started off in card magic when I first began but have for a while now worked solely as a mentalist, and it's quite something.
The reason I enjoy mentalism is this: I've always felt that magic is the type of experience that can change someone. Magic is an anecdote waiting to happen in years and years to come when someone mentions psychology or magic or that magician they just saw, and it all comes back. It's like a really powerful movie, where you leave questioning something you thought you knew. I've always felt magic can be that experience, the wonderful experience, and in the words of Ouisa in John Guare's play Six Degrees of Separation, the problem is "How do we keep the experience?"
For me, mentalism is the area that most closely touches what I perceive the potential of magic to be, what I strive for in my performances. I don't think it gets much closer than that. It is personal by nature because you have to have someone else's mind to read, for example. It is emotional by its very nature, and I am someone who follows emotions first and foremost. So I just feel that this experience is such a unique and beautiful thing, and it is so, so powerful, and it has the potential to be so significant so as to stick with someone for the rest of their lives. This is getting terribly clichéd but you get my point - mentalism for me is what touches this the closest.
One small piece of advice - feel free to take it or leave it. Unless your performing persona actually claims to be able to read minds, I would suggest that you seriously consider exactly what aspects of mentalism you should be performing - I feel that a "jack of all trades" performer who performers a bit of metal bending here, a bit of suggestion here, predicts things there, reads minds with this person and hypnotises that person and reads the group's body language at the same time has a tendency to weaken the overall effect (exaggeration, but again hopefully you understand my point). Work out how you're supposedly doing what you're doing, and ask yourself then, if you were really doing that, would you also be bending spoons, etc.? That way you can create presentations for your effects that work without pushing the creative license you get from simply being a jack of all trades performer.
