otherwise it could easily become an act of self-celebrating masturbation. Considering then the different nature of people, it just begs the question: how do you build your shows? It depends on the context: if it is television, then I must firstly take into consideration time at my disposal, while if it is a private event I make a point of inserting themes about the type of communication communication of concern to the company hosting me, usually to be agreed through some meetings before the day of my performance. Instead, in writing for the theater, having some months of time and maximum freedom to choose a theme that I like, I usually go in the direction of finding a way to explore it through the various experiments which will form the show’s backbone, together with my historical collaborator Deniel Monti, with whom I wrote my last two plays The Game and Human, as well as the entire TV series for Sky Il Mentalista. In your shows, the public and your "victims" always gape. Was there ever a situation in which it was you to be surprised by an unexpected evolution of the events? I would say that surprising things happen almost every time, within that improvisation-zone I always leave in my performances. They are usually pleasant surprises, in which the spectator does something amazing, but once it was a surprise that made my blood run cold: a spectator was in danger of injuring his hand due to a nail hidden under a glass. According to the public, it was the spectator’s mistake: I asked him to raise his hand from the glass, instead he crushed it strongly and only down to luck he mishit the glass, avoiding a serious accident. With a cool head, however, I realized that I messed up too: I accompanied my words [«Raise your hand»] with a clap of my hands. When a spectator is under pressure, in a slight state of hypnotic trance, non-verbal language is more important than the verbal one, meaning that a body gesture comes to him more quickly than words. Despite having said one thing, my gesture of vigorously clapping communicated a different order to the viewer's unconscious. I presented that experiment hundreds of times, and such a thing never happened to me before, but even one time is too much, when you do something dangerous. It was an important lesson. I saw you bringing on stage both common people, show business figures, chess champions, and I wonder: what if instead there was another mentalist facing you, who would you want him to be and what should we expect from this Clash of the Titans? [smiling] Admittedly, it already happened to me several times to call from the audience a spectator at random and then realize, when he joined me on stage, he was a colleague of mine! And the opposite also happened, that is, that I participated in another mentalist’s exhibition. But the mentalist guest on stage of another colleague always acts as if he was a common spectator: it is a kind of unwritten rule, a code of conduct. Then again, my way of presenting experiments is never that of a challenge, where one should expect a winner and a loser: I play with people, not versus them. We have accentuated the aspect of challenge only for some television situations, because it is a language that works well on TV. Is there a dark side of mentalism? Mentalism is in some ways an ambiguous art. Some mentalists propose it as a journey into the world of paranormal, but I have always kept my distance from that kind of representation, because I feel a responsibility towards the public: someone could take literally what he sees on stage and convince himself of things that I for one do not believe in and that do not belong to me - like supernatural, esotericism, superstition. For this reason, what I present is mentalism in a psychological key. Some guys wrote to me about having chosen the faculty of psychology after seeing a show of mine; in those moments I wonder myself thinking about the [negative] impact I could have had, if I had modelled my style in a different way. Tesei, what do you think is the greatest deception? E =O 112
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