Flora Wong
Staff Writer
Magician Mat LaVore, entertained roughly 100 students with a night of astonishment Wednesday in the Campus Center Ballroom.
“If you have a large audiences’ attention, you have a duty to humanity to say something good,” LaVore said.
“I am trying to say life isn’t about the little things people get so caught up in, they forget to live life. That is where the magic happens.”
From swallowing needles to reading minds, LaVore managed to grab the audience’s attention from the start.
“I am going for the form of astonishment,” LaVore said. “Magic is unique that way you can’t get that feeling anywhere else.”
Katie Thompson, CAB comedy chairwoman and senior graphic design major, was happy with the turn-out and how excited the audience was during every act.
“As the comedy chair, I want the students to have a new, fresh act every year,” Thompson said. “I think they really enjoyed this one.”
His ability to captivate the audiences’ attention, while conscious or unconscious, kept everyone engaged and on the edge of their seats as each act progressed. LaVore invited nine students on stage for a hypnosis experience.
He chose five women and four men out of a crowd of 100 students.
He assured each participant that there will be no humiliation involved and emphasized how everyone involved should have fun with what he has in store for them.
LaVore was able to get the students who volunteered to forget their names and fall asleep with a shake of a hand.
One of the five women in LaVore’s hypnotic experience, junior business administration Karina Keshishian, said her mind was relaxed the whole time.
“I felt like I was there for hours,” Keshishian said. “It was weird for him to easily control my thoughts and my actions.”
The audience had nothing but positive remarks about LaVore’s performance.
“It felt pretty cool being a part of the audience because going in there I didn’t really know what to expect since I stopped believing in magic a long time ago,” freshman business administration major John Ceja said.
“But after seeing how he got into our minds and could control some people while they were sleeping, I would definitely say I believe in magic,” he said.
“I thought the show was insanely entertaining,” junior business administration major Victor Mendoza said. “I completely forgot what is real and what is not.”
“The hypnosis … kept me amazed at the level of control sustained over each student from not being able to speak their name or even get out of a chair,” graduate student Jose Calderon said.
Flora Wong can be reached at yuenyuen.wong@laverne.edu.
