Viva Brighton Issue #58 December 2017

MIND READER
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Luke Jermay
‘It’s hard to know where the show will go’
Mine’s an atypical story, with nice closure. I grew
up in a home where people believed in spiritualism,
tarot cards and divination, not in a crazy weird way,
but these things were accepted, so I went along
to spiritualist churches and palmists when I was
growing up.
As a teenager I rebelled, I wanted to debunk the
whole thing, and I discovered the work of people
like James Randi, and Penn & Teller, who wanted
to expose frauds. That ignited a passion in me for
traditional conjuring tricks, pulling a rabbit out of a
hat, that sort of thing.
Then in my early twenties, I looped back to tarot
and palmistry, but this time with a rational frame.
I began to see divination more as a process of introspection
than some pixie magic-dust thing. Intuition
is the key here: we’re constantly assessing the world
with a speed far quicker than conscious cognitions,
and you can often think ‘how on earth can I possibly
have known that?!’
To tune into the intuitive side of the brain and
free yourself from your own thinking, to let
something inside you guide you, is so useful, and
it’s very much linked to the idea of empathy: what
is the other person’s experience? Multiple times in
every show, I’m as shocked as the audience at what
emerges. Not long ago there was a very slim woman
onstage, and I said ‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’ and
it was true, and she hadn’t told her boyfriend who
was there in the front row! Culturally it was a risk to
say it, but it just came up and I did.
It’s hard to know where the show will go: obviously
I have a plan, but there’s no way of knowing. I
want people to drown in the mystery, to be engulfed
in it. That’s my higher goal, the creation of mystery,
producing feelings of uncertainty. We live in a world
of confirmation bias, we can be very closed off to the
unknown, and it can drive some people nuts, that
feeling of genuinely not knowing how something has
happened. The point is, the world isn’t as linear as we
might think. Experts have their views, and they have
models relating to how they think things happen, and
it can make sense up to a point, but no one really has
a clue how it works!
The intimate close connection with the audience
is crucial for me. I wrote the last Dynamo
arena show [he’s also been a consultant for Derren
Brown], but for me once there are more than about
300 people in the audience it’s too big and we lose
connection. We’re in an increasingly disconnected
world anyway: couples lie in bed next to each other,
each of them on their phones, so what I want to do
is connect with the people who’ve come along. And
there’s a 70% chance you’ll be involved if you attend
one of the shows… As told to Andy Darling
Sixth Sense, The Old Market, 3rd December, 7.30pm
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