RODNEY JAMES PIPER INTERVIEW
Hypnotist, magician, entertainer – legend! House of Illusion’s Rodney James Piper shares his literal ‘journey’ into hypnosis and takes us on a much-needed hypno-holiday.
Rodney James Piper is taking credit for the rate at which I’m blinking, and is reciting bits of his stage hypnosis show script to me with 110% conviction and intensity. Yikes! Where is he headed with this?!
I’d done a long day’s writing and had just peeled out my contact lenses prior to us Zooming. But I must admit that Rodney – a hypnotist, a magician, and the owner of an entertainment business and trio of Spanish entertainment venues – is a relentlessly persistent and appealing hypnotist!
Switching in and out of scripting is a particularly trippy meta-experience. But, trooper I am, I brush it off on the codeine I’ve popped for my post-work headache, and focus on the job in-hand – discovering Rodney’s journey into the weird and wonderful world of hypnosis…
And, for Rodney, it literally was a journey. His entertainment company had been booked to do a show in Lloret de Mar – he’d be doing the magic and he’d hired Mike Rose to perform a hypnosis act. The pair were driving down from Salou where Rodney is based, when... “Mike's voice went! He was like: ‘I literally can't speak’,” Rodney recalls. “So in an hour-and-a-half drive he went through the show with me. And I performed my first hypnosis show at that hotel. And it was good!”
That was 20 years ago. Rodney was already an experienced performer the night he became a hypnotist. “I've been performing really all my life, since a kid,” he says. “I did loads of adverts as a child – Fairy Liquid, Sonic the Hedgehog. I pop up in a few little videos! I did loads of child acting.” He’s an alumnus of the BRIT School of performing and creative arts, and was a Butlin’s Redcoat from age 18. “That was a big learning curve for me. I worked with loads of acts, and any excuse I could get on stage, I would, whether it was putting a band on or calling the bingo.”
As is becoming a common thread with our stage performer interviews, Rodney was also already a magician. “What I found as I was getting older was that the acting I did, I was always me. I wanted a vehicle, really, that could let me be me. So magic was part of that. Magic was me coming on, being me, and having a finish with something happening.” He performs mind-reading as well as magic, and is both a member of The Magic Circle and its prestigious Inner Magic Circle.
His performance background and magician’s bravado clearly kicked in the night of his first hypnosis show. He reflects: “I like challenges. I like to put myself in places that push you to your boundaries. With a hypnosis performance or session, it's about getting out there and doing it for the first time. The performance side of it wasn't the difficulty; the difficulty was making sure that I knew what I was doing with the show, and made sure it was safe, that it ran correctly, that everyone was looked after. And it was a great show! Afterwards, the hotel said: ‘We want to book you again for this – can you come? Oh, this is really good!’. Poor Mike lost the gig! (He worked for me anyway, so he didn't lose any money!) But I ended up carrying on doing that show.”
Rodney’s work as a hypnosis entertainer has been predominatly focused on holiday audiences, mostly in Spain. He used to do all the shows for Club 18-30s holidays, performing across the coast (“wild shows back in the days!”). And he can now be found at House of Illusion, one of the venues he owns in Salou, with his Monday late-night hypnosis show a favourite part of his working week.
It’s interesting to consider how these demographics and circumstances are reflected in Rodney’s experiences and perceptions of hypnosis. “What do we do on a holiday? We let our hair down. We do stuff we wouldn't normally do. So, what a stage hypnotist is doing in a holiday environment, whether it's Blackpool or Vegas or here in Salou, is people are there to relax, enjoy themselves – but also get attention. And I think if, as a hypnotist, we can set the frame that that's acceptable, then they're willing and suggestible already because they want that – they've come on holiday to have a good time.”
In discussing ‘trance’, Rodney mentions a typical 18-30s volunteer who illustrates this heightened holiday effect. “After the Club 18-30 shows, I would always have someone who told me they're not awake. Always. Normally, it was the girl who had probably not got much attention in the show. My mindset with that would be: they want their moment. A couple of minutes talking to them afterwards, they're fine. Everyone gathers around: ‘Oh, what's happened?’. They've got their moment. There's a big part of that, isn't there? I mean: what is hypnosis? It's reality TV, isn't it? Big Brother live, Love Island live. You put a group of people on stage – my job is to make them feel comfortable and lead them through that with a script, and make sure that it's a safe and enjoyable experience.”
Ultimately Rodney believes social media and the quest for ‘15-minutes of fame’ has been a boon for his kind of hypnosis. “People want to be stars,” he continues. “I think one thing that's made hypnosis even easier is people want their ‘like’, they want their Facebook ‘click’. They want that attention.” He describes raucous annual Halloween séances, and routines about past lives and feel-good suggestions blended with magic, as well as more risqué ‘ultimate fantasies’ sequences – it certainly sounds like he’s an expert in lifting people out of their humdrum lives and into their favourite primetime-TV reality or variety show; as, if they choose, its stars.
One thing’s for sure, and that’s that Rodney is not lacking in ‘star quality’! He talks about performers seeing their roles as stage hypnotists or other mystery entertainers as simply “walking onto the stage”. He believes: “If you are a hypnotist, you live the life as a hypnotist. When I first came to Spain, I used to walk along the main high street, I’d have my suit on, I’d say hello to everyone. And everyone would say: ‘Oh, that’s the hypnotist! That’s the hypnotist!’. When I got to the show, 50% of my job was done! I was putting ‘an induction’ in as I'm walking to work. I'm not saying I walk around my house in my underpants saying ‘sleep!’ – a hypnotist 24/7! But when you walk out your door, you are who you are.”
Rodney is passionate about the showmanship of hypnosis and mystery entertainment, which is no surprise given his performance pedigree. “A big thing with stage hypnosis is the timing. It's the rhythm. It's making sure not only is the show good, but the words you say flow. There's nothing worse than watching a show with a performer pausing for long gaps, where he's working out what's going right. It should be interactive, and it should be constant.”
He laments this lack of stagecraft in his profession. “The big mistake a lot of people make nowadays as performers is they rush. They build a website, they read a book or watch a DVD, and then think they can do a great show. When really the answer is: don't worry about the gigs – get good. Go and do a job that lets you speak on a microphone, interacting with people – even if it's introducing trains. The theory, we all know, is vitally important. But the craft that you have to learn to be good on a regular basis is brilliant. The reason and the way I managed to do that first ever show was because of the stagecraft that I had had for that 10 years before I even said the word ‘sleep’.”
Rodney has trained up several stage hypnotists over the years, some of whom continue to work as professionals. After watching and assisting him for a season, he introduces upcoming talent into his act and supports them as they develop their own shows. It’s pragmatic and shrewd – Rodney’s done four or five hypnosis shows a week for seven months of a year for 20 years; apprentice hypnotists cover the shows he can’t do. But it’s clear showbiz comes before ‘a hypnosis calling’ – “You have to stand on stage and say, ‘I am a hypnotist. I have power’. The big LED screens, the word ‘hypnotist’ massively on there, walking through the middle of the audience with the lights flashing, and like, ‘boom!’, here I am. If you show one moment of doubt, then you'll be eaten alive – the image is gone.”
I ask Rodney what he thought hypnosis was that night he became a hypnotist and, in turn, how he now explains hypnotism to his apprentices. “Whatever you define hypnosis as, it's a power,” is his reply. “Whether some people say it's not real, it is real: whatever. That's an irrelevant subject and a different discussion. But it's a power. It's a power that is really, really strong.” He bears this in mind when passing on “that torch, that power” to apprentices. “I've trained-up loads of hypnotists that are working around the world, and it’s a big responsibility and I do think you have to be careful. All power needs to be respected. With great power comes great responsibility, as the adage goes!”
And as Rodney gears up for a more normal tourist season now that the pandemic is easing, he’s in no doubt as to how to wield that power. He still loves doing his regular hypnosis show, loves welcoming back regular guests, and loves lifting people out of their regular lives. As he concludes: “Our role as hypnotists is so important now. People have had shit lives for the last two years. Really bad experiences – they're probably scared, they've probably not been able to go out, their money's probably changed. So for us to take them out of that moment and give them a ‘wow!’, give them a moment of stardom, a moment they can enjoy themselves and let themselves go, and give them a big release of enjoyment… I think our job is more important as the stage hypnotist now than ever.”
Ultimately, Rodney is surely the ultimate ‘power hypnotist’ – he doesn’t need or care to know how it works; all he truly knows is that that power comes from his showmanship and experience. And he’s probably right. Here’s to holiday-hypno-hijinks with Rodney this summer!