“It’s comedy. It’s absolute comedy,” hypnotist Peter Powers said of his latest show. “I actually try to make the show as funny as I can from start to finish.”
Peter Powers has been a stage hypnotist since the 1980’s and has made regular visits to Australian shores with his unpredictable shows. Fresh from a run in the UK, Powers is back in Australia and will be performing a show at Blacktown Workers Club later this month.
“I never really know how somebody’s going to react,” he said. “Even if I’ve done the routine 20 times, I can see 20 different reactions. I keep the routines as sort of a skeleton for the show. I love people just to go where they want with it.”
Familiar to most Australian fans because of his appearances on ‘The Footy Show’, Powers tries to make his TV routines and live shows as different as possible so his live audiences never know what to expect.
“I’ve always been very careful not to do stage material on the TV,” he said. “It’s like a comedian really – a comedian would never go on TV and do their best material, or do the funniest joke they can tell.”
Powers first discovered his talent for hypnotism when, at the age of 12, he pretended to hypnotise his younger brother by slowly swinging their father’s pocket watch and repeating calming phrases. To his great surprise, he saw his brother’s eyes begin to close and watched his face relax.
“I just thought he was pretending, as indeed I was, but there was just something about the look on his face,” Powers recalled. “I clapped my hands together and he nearly jumped out of his skin! He was a bit disoriented.”
The next day Powers went to the library and borrowed a book on hypnotism, jump-starting his life-long obsession. It is this obsession that has seen the Englishman dubbed ‘the world’s most evil hypnotist’ – a moniker he is quite pleased with.
“I prefer to think that it’s evil with a cheekiness behind it,” he explained. “I’d say some of the most extreme sorts of things [I’ve ever done] was burying somebody alive and pushing somebody out of a plane, which of course was rather evil.”
Another of Powers’ favourite tricks involves hypnotising a person in an inflatable dingy with a couple of paddles on stage to believe they are lost at sea.
“I’ll play the sound of the rescue plane… or the sound of the ‘Jaws’ theme so they think [that] there’s a shark in the water and that kind of thing,” Powers laughed.
“Just watching the reactions when they’re in that boat – I’ve seen some people take their shoelaces out of their trainers and put it on the end of the paddle and try to fish! Or make some kind of a hat out of their T-shirt – they take it off and make some kind of a hat to put over their head to protect themselves from the sun, and then they’ll get the shoelaces and start trying to catch a fish!”
As well as entertaining crowds, Powers also has a passion for hypnotism’s therapeutic capabilities.
“I’m obviously interested in the comedy side – it’s what I do, it’s my career,” he said. “But I’m very, very interested in how the mind works. So I’ve used hypnosis and hypnotic techniques for phobias and removing pain.”
This interest in other hypnotic forms led Powers to an intriguing discovery in the Netherlands, where he was performing therapeutic hypnotism on an 11-year-old boy that didn’t speak a word of English.
“This was for a TV show, and as it was a therapeutic situation they had a monitor [and] all these little electronic sensors all over his scalp, so they could see what was happening to his brainwave activity,” he said.
Powers explained that he managed to hypnotise the boy by speaking a little Dutch, but thought he would need to use a translator after the initial process.
“But, in fact, the reverse was true. What I found from filming him for about 40 minutes was that every time I started to speak, his brainwave activity would go down regardless of what I’ve said. Whereas when my translator spoke, he started to come out of [hypnosis].”
Powers discovered that there was something strange in the hypnotic process that seemed to break down the language barrier.
“I really don’t know what that is and I’ve not read anything about it either, but I found it just from doing it,” he said.
So audiences beware, it seems no-one can escape the hypnotist’s Powers!
