A performer gets on a stage, alone in the spotlight, with no script or cue cards to rely on. And they do it night after night.
From freestyle rappers to stand-up comedians and political orators, there are essential tensions at the heart of this kind of performing art. Yet every show is different — off the cuff, directing the currents of audience reactions, balancing the demands of showmanship and the necessity of telling a story.
This tightrope between the medium and the message is not much seen, successfully at least, in Australian public life, the project of which Don Watson has said is to “remove the meaning from words, to make them as anodyne and dull as possible, and not to generate human interest, but to squash it”.
But if we were to eulogise oratory, it would be a sorry speech indeed.
One who can claim to command the maelstrom, and in his way does, is John Edward. Best known from his television show Crossing Over, he is a folksily avuncular medium who, at 45 years old, is arguably the world’s most famous psychic. From Oprah to South Park, everyone wants a piece of him. The New York native has run a hectic international tour schedule since first appearing on Larry King in 1998 and is touring Australia again in November. He looks good on camera, and, in a phone interview, I put to him that he does well in front of a crowd.
He laughs at that idea. “When I’m doing what I do, I feel like I’m taking control and I’m teaching. If I had to get up there and talk about me, that would make me very self-conscious.”
Plenty has been said about John Edward’s show and the business of spiritualism in general — some lambasting what they see as a morally questionable confidence trick, while enormous swathes of Caodaists, Christians and agnostics incorporate it into their worldview. At heart, it’s a public séance in which Edward purports to describe sounds and images he experiences to the audience as deliberate communications from the deceased, who, he says, are attempting to contact audience members through him.
But while the trappings and practices of psychic performance have been dissected and sifted in search of veracity, the craft, showmanship and — dare I say — artistry of the medium remains uninvestigated. I’m no believer, except in the power of a good show. Could I still enjoy a “psychic performance”?
Edward doesn’t see himself as a performer, saying “sometimes I have to remind people –there’s no glass here, there’s no TV screen, this is not a show…it’s me and a mike.”
But he also acknowledges performative elements in what he does, agreeing that “I know why [the audience is] coming to see me. I have no delusions or illusions about why they’re here. People don’t want to watch Madonna cook”.
He is a practiced speaker, equally capable of conducting a crowd of hundreds or concentrating attention on a single individual with an intense yet hospitable focus. Above all, his shows are subdued — none of the convulsions and speaking in tongues of a Delphic oracle or a Revivalist Church.
Modern spiritualism has its roots in the pseudoscience of Mesmerism and animal magnetism, later refined into hypnotherapy and meditation. Undertones of trance underlie much psychic practice, carried to the beat of rhythmic music or meditation, accompanied by entheogens or fasting. There are echoes of the creative epiphanies artists claim through communing with their unconscious Muse.
Edward doesn’t go in for that kind of thing. “No drugs or alcohol involved,” he laughs, and despite the potentially macabre material of his work, there is a family-friendly tone to it. After several experiences with trance mediumship early in his career, he’s decided “I don’t like the way it feels. I won’t let that happen again”.
Nonetheless, there are elements of hyperfocus in his speech patterns, a kind of cultivated dissociation. He recalls one incident in particular, “being in that river where the information is flowing” while reading for a woman.
“I remember having the thought – ‘Oh. Shit. I don’t know what the hell is happening right now’…And then I remember thinking, ‘If this part of my thinking gets in the way of my reading’…I was afraid I was going to lose that flow.”
If trance, artistic or otherwise, has the serendipitous effect of removing the speaker as a frame, letting the audience see past them to the pure information of their message, what does this mean for a medium who refuses to engage with it?
It could be that Edward’s audience is relying on his interpretation of messages from the other side, which even done in good faith is unverifiable. With no access to the source material, he is essentially the middleman in a game of Chinese whispers, working as an interpreter for two parties invisible to one another.
Over time, to alleviate those issues, Edward has worked to improve his understanding of the signs he experiences. He now works partially phonetically, explaining “if I feel like swallowing the vowel, because of how I want to say it, I can then describe — this is not L like Lucille, it’s L like Helen”. His metalanguage is unrefined but not inexact, allowing him to transfer higher quality information to his audience.
And in some senses, it’s the audience which is the star of his show. When I question his accuracy, he laughs. “I’m 100% positive that I’m going to misinterpret the information that is given to me.” He’s careful to provide the raw information of “what I’m seeing, hearing and feeling” along with a basic translator’s dictionary — “I’m going to tell what in my experience it would mean to me. But I’m very very clear that my ego not get in the way, of having to be right.”
It’s a wise choice. The fraught terrain where ego and information converse is littered with false signposts. Instead, Edward walks the narrow ridge between medium-as-transparent and medium-as-interpreter.
Tertullian wrote that mediumship is an act “in which the demons masquerade as the souls of the dead”. Robert Frost argued that “poetry is what gets lost in translation”. Clairvoyants have been popularly depicted as speaking unwanted truths, from Clytemnestra to Tony Randall.
In any case, it seems the safest bet to let the audience craft their own meaning from your raw materials.
But Edward’s abdication of authorship is not entirely a soft option. From the Socratic dialogues onwards, active audiences have played a part in art. Indeed, at the crux of Edward’s act is a dialectical educational experience.
It’s a point he returns to again and again. “It’s not a production or performance for me. It’s a classroom.” He talks on an epistemology that preferences intuition and unconscious knowledge, with psychic elements forming a demonstrative aspect to a positive-thinking worldview that, in itself, is hardly disagreeable.
The showmanship is just a flourish, an acknowledgement of the demands and practicalities that teachers and stage performers alike contend with.
Psychic performance is easy to paint as malicious, with its carny code of kayfabe and insistence on the inexplicable. But you could argue that Edward’s mediumship, with its elements of theatrical “edutainment” and Christian mysticism, should instead be viewed like a touring mystery play.
His show, then, could be an attempt to elucidate the message of 1 Corinthians: that human and spiritual fellowship, as a system of understanding the world, is untrumpable: outperforming prophecy, outlasting language, and besting any other effort to see the world “through a glass, darkly”. If that’s the case, the success or failure of a psychic act could be judged — for skeptics and believers alike — not on the ability to suspend disbelief in the phenomena of the show; but on the charisma of the medium and the elegance of their message.
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