Has anyone got any of his stuff ,it sounds quite interesting?

i do. i can only urge you not to buy his stuff if you are nothing short of an experienced mentalist and comfortable performer. this is mostly linguistic deception.

Yes, Luke's stuff is amazing I have 'Bizzare' and '7 Deceptions' and I love them both. Him and Kenton Knepper I my favourite mentalists. They are both simlar and have soe great material.

what is "Bizarre

do you have anything from kenton? but i would like to add that Luke Jermay has done a substantial amount of work on suggestion. one of his books and kentons miracles of suggestion with the right amount of practice can make you very good at this art

i've got the skullduggery dvd and building blocks. skullduggery helps you perform some of the tricks from seven deceptions and bilding blocks helps you with suggestions and has some routines in it

I'm starting to get sick of people saying Luke Jermay's stuff is for advanced performers only. It's hard to master but that does not mean you should not get it itf u aren't advanced. Skullduggery is the first mentalism dvd i've bought and i have got the tricks down through hard work. So just practice and don't be scared.

The fact is though, if you aren't experienced, you should be starting somewhere else. You don't run before you can crawl. The best way to get into mentalism is 13 steps. It will give people the foundation that they need to be a mentalist. Then from there, they can start working up to the more advanced stuff.

What is Bizarre?

Brucelee

I have his SKULLDUGGERY DVD and was very disappointed by it.

The effects were ho-hum and his performance simply wasn't entertaining. To the contrary, the spectators seemed ill at ease!

At one point in the DVD he crosses the line into acting as a therapist, allegedly helping a spectator get rid of one of her phobias. (sigh)

The female spectator seemed especially shell shocked after the performance.

Getting your spectators to feel like they've been assaulted is certainly a unique approach to mentalism. Is this how an audience should be treated?

I really like Building Blocks. Not even so much for the effects in it but the theory and presentation built into them. You can really learn a lot from him.

In 7 Deceptions, in which the 7th Deception is also explained, he makes it very very very clear that it is not therapy under any circumstances, and that he is always careful to pick the phobia that is common and easy to talk away. Also, the main aim of the effect really is to have predicted which phobia she will pick and reveal the prediction in a flashy way. He says to picks things like spiders, dogs, birds, but never anything that would require actual therapy like agoraphobia or thantophobia. Pick your phobia carefully and you might actually help you spectator with a placebo effect pseudo therapy session. Worse case scenario is that they don't get rid of the phobia and are disappointed. Best case is that is maybe vanishes for a few days and they revel in the effect - not only did he predict it but he got rid of it.

Derren Brown outlines a very simple way of ridding oneself of phobias like birds, bees, fingers etc in Tricks of the Mind - it is self help and mild hypnosis and really, not a huge amount of difference separates it from the Jermay 7th Deception bar who is doing the talking and the atmosphere and manner it is presented in. I personally think that 7th Deception is a fantastic piece of mentalism and congratulate Jermay for pushing the boundries of the art with it.

I'll be honest and say I've not seen any performance of Jermay's from the DVD but I'd be interested to see if the audience are quite so ill at ease as you say. I always had the impression that Luke was a warm and charming entertainer.

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He says this on the DVD too.

So...the spectator is expected to read "The 7th Deception" or watch the DVD? I don't understand your point. It seems to me it was presented to the woman on the DVD as actual therapy. Are you saying he took her aside later and told her it was just rubbish and that he was just making flash paper...flash?

Be my guest and check it out. I was quite taken aback by the way he treated the spectators, especially the female.

What do you base your impression of him on right now? Have you seen him perform live or what?

All I've seen of his performances are clips from either street based stuff to show off his latest ID here, and a youtube video of a couple of things he did for English telly some time well before he was famous (or at least as famous as he is now).

I got the impression from the book that when you perform 7th Deception you should present it in as sincere a manner as possible, but if asked if you could anything else or if it's real therapy or what to tell the truth. When I say truth what I mean is to tell them that you are an entertainer, not a therapist, and that what they saw was a rather flashy and important looking trick but a trick none the less. I wouldn't tell them about how it's done, like the flash paper or that, but tell them it was entertainment. Also, I think that if performing it myself the spectator looked extremely uneasy after the effect I would make sure I went to her afterwards and found out why and put her at ease if possible. Of course, you'll never see this on the DVD because there's cost issues, time limitations etc. Sadly I haven't the book to hand to read it again and see if there's anything I could pull out of it quote wise to put forward Luke's view on it if he writes it.

One more thing I'll say purely as a kind of 'devil's advocate' type comment, but what you saw there was probably an audience pulled into a studio to film a magic show, and maybe they were ill prepared for what type of magic they saw (think L&L publishing with their standard audience, the same people in the same room all the time, the same over the top reactions making sure the same audience get picked again - no realism in those performances if you ask me, not often). Also, that lady was one spectator out of a whole world of 6 billion people, it could just be Luke's bad luck he got the one that got real scared on his DVD.

Unless the video is on youtube there will be no watching it for me - broke and owning 7 Deceptions prevents me from buying/wanting to buy Skullduggery.

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