Pieces of Mind
Simon Taylor @ The Science Exchange (Tower Room)
8:30pm, Thu 24 Feb 2011
Running late, but only hopping from one end of the RiAus building to the other, there’s only a short queue leading into the Tower Room – and, as usual, I try to help the performer out by sitting in the front row. Of course, this comes back to bite me as the room fills out, leaving me sitting prone for “volunteering” at the front of a full room (though it probably only holds about forty people at full capacity).
Simon Taylor looks quietly intense: his tightly buttoned shirt inside power-blue suit is an odd pairing, but you barely notice… because of his scarily dark eyes, and the power they imbue. I suspect that coloured contacts are assisting him in that regard, but the overall effect is that – when he clasps his hands and peers into the audience – you feel like he is looking right through you.
Which, of course, is pretty much the point, as Taylor pitches himself as a mind-reader.
Opening with a few laid-back jokes, he drifted into a little light theory about the human mind – it’s all pretty fanciful, and when I’m yanked out of the audience to demonstrate his first “principle” of mind reading, I inadvertently blurted out the secret behind his “dropped colours” trick. Thankfully, I don’t think anyone noticed, and I was not called upon again.
But he was able to manage some pretty neat demonstrations: getting five people from the audience to draw pictures, then identifying their pictures via body language (or were the cards marked?) was intriguing, and psyching audience members during the cups game was likewise confounding. But there were a few tricks that were also being performed on the other side of town by Ali Cook – coercing two different people to draw the same picture through the power of suggestion, the large number guess – though I much preferred Taylor as a performer; whilst not as exuberant, he was most certainly more personable… and convincing.
Taylor was once, apparently, a psychology student – though I suspect that a large amount of this act is powered by misdirection and suggestion, rather than any amazing science. But he’s a polished (if slightly creepy) performer that kept me guessing long after I’d left the Tower Room… in fact, as I dashed off to my next show, I brushed past him in the corridors of RiAus. I couldn’t help but think he was heading back in to the rest of the audience, announcing “that’s the skeptic out of the way… let’s finish this show off.”