talkmagic.co.uk

The Times wrote:Mental as anything

Marc Salem can read minds. It's not magic, in fact we all could - with 30 years' practice, he tells Brian Logan


I think I’m going to get you up on stage this time, Brian.” Oh no. I’d rather he didn’t. I’ve seen the American mind-reader Marc Salem many times. I’m his biggest fan. And he always ends his show with the same astonishing routine. He asks the audience to think about holidays they’ve been on in the past. Then, even as he’s busy performing another flabbergasting trick, identifying random objects while blindfolded with duct tape, he shouts out the names of audience members and tells them all about those holidays.
The past two times I’ve seen him, he’s called out my name, and I’ve been too scared to respond. “But why?” he now asks. “I’m so gentle with people.”



Well, that’s true. But there’s nothing gentle about the impact of his show, which sends one out into the night reeling at its implications, and nursing a shrinking faith in the independence of one’s own mind. “What happens,” says Salem, “is that people leave and they see the world through different eyes.”

Salem has spent a lifetime acquiring skills which, he insists, “any ten-year-old could master — with 30 years’ practice”. Salem was born 54 years ago as Moshe Botwinick (Salem is his wife’s maiden name) and his father was a rabbi with a similar talent. “He was a very sharp judge of people’s emotions and what was on their minds. I believe I have inherited part of that.” The adult Salem worked as an academic psychologist, and spent ten years as the director of research on Sesame Street. He also shares his lie-detecting skills with the FBI and the New York police. His expertise is in non-verbal communication; on the ways the mind receives information and creates meaning.

This professorial pedigree is an integral part of Salem’s stage act. Whereas his UK counterpart Derren Brown is all Grand Guignol, smoke and mirrors, Salem is no frills — and more credible as a result. “Derren is absolutely brilliant,” says Salem. “But whereas Derren takes great theatrical traditions and writes them large, I do the opposite. I make them more personal.” But he admits that his academic demeanour is as much an act as Brown’s braggadocio. “Marshall McLuhan once said: ‘Anyone who thinks there’s any difference between entertainment and education doesn’t know the first thing about either.’ All the best educators are showmen.”

The publicity for his new show, entitled On Second Thoughts, suggests that Salem will be cranking up the theatrics. Certainly he will be developing a recent routine in which he risks slicing himself up with a bread knife. “But I’m not going to hurt myself or kill myself. I’m not an idiot.”

Is there pressure to keep trumping previous achievements? “To a certain extent,” says Salem. “But I don’t have to be like David Blaine, where each illusion must be more dangerous. What I need is for the show to keep getting more human and more accessible.” To that end, On Second Thoughts “is more autobiographical” than its predecessors. The show draws on Salem’s recent experiences as a grandfather, which have led to “a new way of seeing and under- standing, a renewed sense of wonder, and of what’s going on in the mind”.

Mention of his home life suggests the question it’s impossible not to ponder after seeing his shows: what must it be like to be Salem’s wife? How can you live with a man who reads your thoughts and sees through your little white lies? “That is a common question,” says Salem, “and the simple answer is, I married my wife because she’s the most honest person I know.”

She’d have to be. But, for the first six months of their relationship, Salem didn’t let her see his stage act. “Because it makes people a little unnerved,” he says. Just a little.

So what is the nature of Salem’s skill? To what extent is it a gift, and to what extent trickery? Salem insists that “I make no claims. I’m not selling a bill-of-goods. I’m not there as a lecturer or a professor. I’m there as an entertainer. If people are entertained, then I have fulfilled my role.” He doesn’t mind whether audiences think he’s reading minds or pulling a fast one — as long as they don’t think he’s supernatural. “Because supernatural carries with it the emotional luggage of religion, belief systems, other beings, visions. I don’t want any of that connected with my show.”

Salem agrees that the recent rise in popularity of acts such as his reflects a culture of distrust in traditional sources of information. “There’s always a rise of this kind of entertainment when people are confused.” He compares his skills with those of the advertiser. “I’m manipulating the mind in a spirit of play,” says Salem. “But the advertiser has a different purpose, which is to make you buy a product that may be good or may be inferior. I do think that we want better defences against that.”

“I do believe,” he says, “that the number one secret of everything I do is paying attention. We live in a culture today in which people don’t pay attention. We don’t pay attention to what other people are saying. We don’t pay attention to what we look at. We’re so overwhelmed with multimedia images, the internet, posters, magazines, TV, radio, film, that our minds are exploding and we don’t know how to pay attention to any one thing.”

When Salem is blindfolded onstage, and punters like me are busy concentrating on our holidays, what the mind-reader is doing is paying attention. “I’m picking up a wide range of cues. I am highly attuned to sound, to smell, to the people who are up there onstage, to things I overhear, things that may only be a whisper but to me are loud. And I will make use of all those. And sometimes I just guess — and the guesses are usually right.”

There’s nothing supernatural about this. Trusting sensory perception, he says, is as old as time. “For most of humankind’s life, we did not rely on our eyes as a primary source of information. Early man only survived because, if a wild animal was behind him, he would sense it. That’s not supernatural, it’s just part of our sensory make-up. And we’ve lost a lot of that.”

Current neurological research tends to bear out Salem’s ideas, that the brain’s electrical activity may be perceptible and transmittable. So much so that Salem fears for the future of mentalism. “Science may in the next 50 years reach what it is that I do onstage.” So will this art-form survive into the next century? “I don’t think so.” And will it be a better world when we can all deconstruct information and read one another’s thoughts? “The more people can read other people, the more open our relationships are. Over a period of time, we came to think that we had to hide far too much. Once we understand that we don’t have to and that we’re safe, that will be a very good experience for people.”



Marc Salem, Tricycle Theatre, London NW6 (www.tricycle.co.uk 020-7328 1000), from July 18