Mentalism show · Mind reading · Stage
Thirty to sixty minutes of mind reading, predictions and influence on stage, written for the room it is played in: your executives, your clients, their thoughts. With, if you wish, a working artificial intelligence as the second mentalist. In English and French.
What a mentalism show is
A mentalism show is a stage performance in which the performer appears to read thoughts, predict choices and influence decisions, using psychology, suggestion, observation and technique rather than boxes and doves. No one is sawn in half. A guest thinks of a word and it is named; a decision made freely on stage was written down a week ago and sealed in an envelope; a stranger's memory is described in detail. The audience does not watch a mentalism show so much as take part in it, which is why it holds an adult, international, corporate room where a magic show would not. Hugo Marceau, a professional since 2010, performs it more than two hundred times a year, in French and English, from Lyon to Geneva and the French Riviera.
What to expect
Opening · the room is read
No volunteers yet. Hugo names things people in the audience are thinking, from their seats: a name, a number, the city someone was born in. In three minutes the room has stopped checking its phones and started checking its neighbours.
Second movement · prediction
Guests come up and make decisions nobody could have planned: a card, a word from a book, a drawing. A prediction sealed before the dinner, held by your chairman or the organiser since the start of the evening, is opened. It matches. This is the moment the company's message can live in: the award, the figure, the destination.
Third movement · influence
The part that gets talked about on the drive home. Hugo shows, with a guest, how attention is directed and a choice is shaped without the person noticing, then explains just enough of the psychology for the room to recognise itself in it. In the version with the AI, this is where the artificial intelligence takes over and reads the room in its turn.
Finale
When the venue allows it, a guest is levitated in full light in the middle of the room, and the photographer has the picture of the evening. When it does not, the finale ties every thread of the show into one revelation that was there from the first minute.
Two minutes of it
A longer cut and references are sent with the proposal.
Mentalism show or magic show?
A magic show makes things appear, vanish and change, and the audience watches. A mentalism show makes thoughts appear, and the audience takes part. The props are minimal, nothing is hidden in a box, and the effects feel as if they happened to the guest rather than in front of them. That is why a mind reading show, the work of a psychological illusionist rather than a conjuror, holds a room of sceptical adults, finance directors and engineers among them, where a purely visual act asks them only to watch. It is also why it crosses languages: a thought read across the room lands the same way whether the guest thinks in English, French, German or Arabic.
Hugo is a magician as well as a mentalist, which is why the show still contains one or two moments of pure impossibility, the levitation among them. But the spine is mental, and so is the memory people take home.
Three versions
Written for your room
Every performance is rewritten around the people who will be in it. Before the evening, Hugo asks for the brand, the figures of the year, the product being launched, the inside references the whole company knows, the names worth knowing and the languages at the tables. The prediction is sealed with your content in it. The guest who comes up for the third movement is chosen for the room, not at random. The finale is timed to the kitchen and the speeches. Confidential material is handled under NDA, and nothing is published afterwards without consent.
The result is a show that the audience experiences as its own. Guests remember the night the chairman opened an envelope that contained the name of the award winner written a month earlier, not the night a performer did tricks. That is the difference between entertainment and the thing people talk about on Monday.
Tailor-made for your evening
Fees on request. Every show is tailored to the running time, the audience, the venue and the travel involved.
Prefer to talk first? +33 6 88 61 29 00, WhatsApp welcome, English and French. Agencies: see the page for event planners.
Before you enquire
No, and Hugo Marceau says so. Mentalism is a performing art: the effects are built from psychology, suggestion, observation, memory and technique, rehearsed for years, and presented as the illusion of reading thoughts. Nothing supernatural is claimed. That honesty is what makes the show work in a corporate room full of intelligent, sceptical people.
Never. Guests who come up are the heroes of the moment, not the joke; the only thing revealed is a thought they chose to think. Nobody is hypnotised, nobody is asked to do anything odd, and the chief executive is not the target unless you ask. People go back to their table applauded.
Thirty, forty-five or sixty minutes, depending on the evening. At a gala, thirty to forty-five minutes after the main course and before the speeches is the slot that holds the room. At a conference, the longer version can open or close the day; the sixty-minute AI keynote is its own format.
From a boardroom of forty to a plenary of a thousand. The show is written for seated rooms: guests come up from the floor so every table has a stake, the reveals are large and binary, and for rooms above two hundred the venue's screens relay the close-ups.
A magic show makes things appear, vanish and change; the audience watches. A mentalism show makes thoughts appear: a word, a name, a memory, a choice not yet made. The audience takes part, the props are minimal, and the effects feel like they happened to the guest rather than in front of them. For an adult, international, corporate audience, mentalism lands better.
A sound system with a headset microphone, a playing area of about three metres by two, and the room's own lighting. For the version with the artificial intelligence, add a screen or projector with HDMI and a stable internet connection. A one-page rider comes with the proposal.
Fees are quoted on request and depend on the running time, the audience, the venue, the customisation and the travel involved. One all-inclusive figure, travel included, within one business day. No price list, because a thirty-minute show for eighty guests and a sixty-minute show with an AI for six hundred are not the same evening.
Hugo Marceau, mentalist and AI magician · What is mentalism? · Corporate event entertainment · Gala dinners · Birthday parties · AI magician · Tech magician · iPad close-up · About Hugo Marceau · For event planners