Headbox Gallery 5

Oh, so now you’re curious about why in some instances there would be two people waiting in some cubicles. Yes, usually a head box only works on one head at a time there are three that require two participants; these I generally avoid, because your experience of the magic not only depends on Ian doing the magic, but on your performance partner and how they are, too.

Of the dual participant items the one I have most experience of is the scalp swap boxes. Yes, it does exactly what it says. My preparation for this is to do my hair in a French braid, unless the other person has a French braid already, in which case I put it up in a ponytail. Ian will usually ask two of us with long hair to do this, because it allows him to have some of each victim’s hair emerging from the box, but if he can’t get two long haired volunteers, he’ll settle for a long and a short and get the short-haired person to tie a ribbon into their hair.

As usual it begins with the volunteers sat in chairs with the back of the neck stock in place and the support for the rest jutting forward either side of their neck. Ian fits rest of the stock to each volunteer and then he fits the lower half of the box; this consists of a square front and two triangular sides. The front has a round hole in it to show the volunteer’s face. Once this is attached to the base, he gets the other halves which consist of the top and the back of the head box with triangles at the sides. This is hooked into place and the lengths of hair or ribbon pulled through a hole at the back.

These preparations in place he slides a pair of blades between the two sections of each box. This comes with the usual jumble of feelings and sensation as the presence of the blade disrupts how your mind works, as I have mentioned before.

It gets a bit more confusing when the upper rear section is pulled away. This takes people different ways, some just go blank, almost as if their mind switches off or they are in a hypnotic trance, others look confused or even frightened. I have done it enough times to usually manage a smile. Of course, all of these expressions are visible to the audience due to the window holes in the front of the box section that remains on the neck stock. I find if I can manage a smile it will usually calm the other person.

The next part of the procedure is to place the seperated sections on the box they did not originate on and pull the blades back out. This where it gets weird, even by my standards. I generally find myself thinking about stuff that would never occur to me to think about and remembering stuff that never happened to me; this has up- and down-sides. Sometimes it is a memory of something that I have never tried and I get to work out if it is something I might enjoy without having to try it first; this has saved me from some bad experiences and pointed me towards some good ones. Other times it is a memory of some trauma, which I would much rather not know about. And of course there is always some of what is on the other person's mind.

While each of us are getting used to thinking with half the other's brain, Ian will be removing to rear/top halves of the boxes so that the audience can see the differences that have been caused; contrasts in hairstyle and hair colour on our reconstructed heads. The time I swapped scalps with a bald woman convinced me that voluntary baldness was not for me, but that may have had more to do with the fact that her brain was a little scrambled by the chemo for her cancer than the feeling of baldness itself.

The upside to this is that you have someone to talk to while Ian continues the tour, unless that other person has shutdown from the effects of the magic. They say to understand someone you need to walk a mile in their shoes; spend half an hour using their brain and you have a good idea of what makes them tick, which will lead to friendship or an intense desire to avoid that person for the rest of your life.

The next dual-volunteer magic is the head swap boxes. You might expect that this was done by chopping off the heads with a blade through the neck and switching the positions of the boxes. Ian says that for technical reasons that he is working on that is not currently possible. What he does is perform the dagger headbox on the first volunteer (usually me), then, my head box open, he performs that same of volunteer number two taking the daggers from my head box as he needs them for the second one, so it becomes clear that my box is truly empty. Having shown the audience the second headbox contains only daggers he shuts that up and transfers the daggers back to the first headbox. He then opens the second headbox to reveal the first volunteer's face, before closing the first headbox, pulling out the daggers and re-opening to reveal the face of volunteer two.

This feels much as you might expect from what I've told you earlier; the vaguely pleasant, but undefinable, sensation of blades entering your head with the grinding noise as they scrape through your skull, then the peaceful absence when your head is finally vanished. Of course, the peaceful headlessness does not last as long as for the standard headbox demonstration because your head reappears in the other box; fortunately, moments after the last dagger has left the new box. Then you have to get used to sitting and breathing with someone else's body; this doesn't take all that long, but it is disconcerting to have to think about doing these things that come so naturally in your own body. Then once the essentials like breathing, maintaining a heartbeat and not flopping all over the place are taken care of, your brain goes into a, sort of, self-check mode, during which you become hyper-aware of the new body you are now temporarily in charge of. It is amazing to me how much concentration you can put into examining the differences in the ways your new toes rub against each other, compared to how your old toes did, especially when you are trying to ignore the peculiar sensations generated by having a different set of private parts or a set of boobs that are differently sized and shaped and sitting in a different bra.

The last one? That is perhaps the weirdest of the three. Once the boxes are in place with an open face so the audience can see what is happening, Ian inserts a blade vertically separating the sitters' faces from their heads; at this point the faces go blank, by which I meant lacking emotion, not featureless. He then separates the faces and switches them and pulls out the blades.

It is very odd to see your face attached to another body, see it animated by a different mind. At least your thoughts are your own. And this was how I learn that pierced anything, but particularly lips and tongue, are not for me.