As a huge skeptic of any form of mind magic, Colin Cloud totally threw me off this year at Adelaide Fringe Festival.
Ever seen the TV series The Mentalist or any one of the Sherlock Holmes movies? The UK’s Colin Cloud is often referred to as “The Deductionist” or “The Real-life Sherlock”, likening his “thought-reading” abilities to that of the main characters in both The Mentalist and Sherlock. In other words, Colin is not a psychic, a fortune-teller, a magician nor a tarot card reader; he actually uses a mind-blowing set of skills to read one’s body language and divulge their thought patterns through making smart deductions about that particular individual. There’s actually science there.
In fact, from a very young age, Colin became fascinated by the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, as he tried to replicate Sherlock’s mind-boggling abilities. At the age of 15 years, Colin was accepted into the University of Glasgow to study Forensic Investigation, going on to study an Honours degree and specialising in criminal profiling. He has always been indisputably clever.
After abandoning his criminal profiling career to pursue the field of entertainment as a performer, speaker, comedian and writer, Colin became renowned around the world for his seemingly inexplicable mind-reading abilities. Colin has now come all the way down to Adelaide for our 2016 Fringe Festival and is putting on a killer show.
The Adelaidian attended last night with little background knowledge on Colin Cloud and ready to give the show our utmost skepticism, but we were left speechless. Throughout the show, Colin performed a number of tests on the crowd including a game of rock, paper, scissors and a hypnotism exercise to strategically choose his victims. He impressively guessed a lady’s career as a personal assistant, that a man was a keyboard player and the last name of a celebrity the man was thinking of, all through asking just a few questions.
Colin continued to guess a number of things; he guessed physical actions, objects from people’s purses, specific places and areas where people were from… this Fringe artist continued to shock and surprise us throughout the night without fail! But as thrilling as it was, it was clear there was no supernatural phenomenon happening here. Colin was clever and calculated in every question he asked and everything he took note of.
Cues in body language and responses gave Colin all the clues he needed to divulge a correct answer, and this was what we found particularly endearing about the show. There was nothing fake, no sneaky behind-your-back tricks, no pretending-to-be-magic… everything was as is. So don’t be afraid to check out Colin at The Garden of Unearthly Delights this Fringe season because, although his skill set is sometimes unnerving and quite confronting in a sixth sense manner, it is actually really remarkable in a scientific way.
We rate: ★★★★★ 5/5 stars
Image: provided
