Robert Kennzington.com Reviews1

Hip-notist: Robert Kennzington puts his 'hypno-energy' on display
By Melissa Schorr
LAS VEGAS SUN

Robert Kennzington already has me mesmerized.
He walks into the room, all hulking shoulders and polished moustache and dominating presence, sits down and suddnely, my eyes begin to glaze over and my head feels woozy.
The source of his power is unclear. Is it his snake-oil salesman rapid-patter style of talk?
His piercing blue eyes, each of which has been insured for a million bucks by a London insurance firm?
Or just the overpowering scent of his Old Spice cologne?
Whatever it is, I am not alone.

The master hypnotist and author of "Hypno-Energy: You Have All The Drugs You'll Ever Need," has been entrancing audiences nightly around the world with his traveling production show, "Hypno-Odyssey," which is now parked at the Sahara hotel-casino, in the middle of a two-week run.
Kennzington clearly has the power to mesmerize -- but we are here to find out if he also has the ability to hypnotize.

* Kennzington, 39, defines hypnosis as "the exercise of intentionally creating an altered mental state."
Simply put, he says, it is like watching a movie: "Everybody knows they're in a room staring at a wall," he explains. "Yet, if it's a good movie, they may experience happiness, sadness, more emotions than they have for years." Similarly, people who are hypnotized may be in an altered state, but they are still very aware of what's around them.

"It's almost like being on an LSD drug trip," he says. "It feels great, you know what's happening but you don't care -- you're selectively ignoring. "Hypnosis is like weight-lifting for the mind -- you gotta work at it, but when you train yourself to see the image you want to see, you can control your environment," he explains, citing basketball star Michael Jordan as one who is "clearly hypnotized," able to see in his own mind the successful shot he is about to take -- and often make it a reality.

Born in Chicago, the part-Native American, part-Sicilian hypnotist has been in the field since he was a child. At the age of 6, with Kennzington near death from a case of scarlet fever, hypnotist Robert Dante was brought in as a last resort and, as Kennzington puts it, "saved his life."
Kennzington's cure was dubbed a "textbook case," and he began traveling with Dante and studying under him for the next 20 years, eventually offering seminars at various colleges, teaching hypnosis to other therapists at the Psycho-Neurology Foundation and working with patients suffering from ailments such as anorexia and alcoholism.

"People think hypnosis is some flaky Dracula thing, but it's not," he says. "It was accepted by the American Medical Association in 1958."
In select cases, hospitals may even opt to use "hypno-anesthesia" for heart transplant patients for whom typical pain killers are too risky, training the patient through hypnosis to suppress the sensation of pain in a certain part of the body.
"You can fake any mental state," he points out, "but hypnosis is one you can check. Using it for anesthesia -- that's a pretty big check."
"Some (people) don't use the word hypnosis," he adds, "they call it guided imagery, visualization, biofeedback -- anything to put your mind at ease."

Still, those on the therapeutic side of hypnosis tend to sniff their noses at those such as Kennzington who have crossed over to the performance side. "On that side of the tracks you always put the shows down," he says. "They demean it."
But Kennzington insists that his 6-year-old show "does good." Typically, the show begins with Kennzington bringing more than 100 people of all types, from doctors to New Age types, from hippies to Trekkies, onto the stage.

Once there, he quickly winnows out the most apt pupils, thrusting them into the limelight to reenact bits from movies such as "Rocky" and TV shows such as "The Brady Bunch."
"They're stars," he says. "Their talents come out. Usually, something happens by accident and it's hysterical."

* We are on the way to his 27th floor suite, where Kennzington will attempt to hypnotize me.
Correction: "I don't hypnotize anybody," he explains, deftly getting himself off the hook. "Nobody hypnotizes anybody. All hypnosis is self-hypnosis. It's still you hypnotizing yourself. You have to accept the suggestion. You do it to yourself."

He offhandedly remarks that creative and intelligent people make the best candidates, since they are already practitioners of visualization anyway.
Before long, I am sitting upright in a chair, breathing deeply while the metronome (tick) before me (tick) beats steadily (tick) while the small green light (tick) weaves back and forth (tick) before my eyes.
Kennzington isn't so cliched as to say "you are growing very, very sleepy," but sure enough, with just a few suggestions to relax my muscles, my eyelids are drooping, my head is slumped, and my hands feel glued to my lap. I'm not totally under, though -- I can feel my heart pounding and I'm still conscious enough to worry that in my hyper-relaxed state, I'm about to drool on my shirt.

"Picture yourself on a raft," he instructs in a smooth, steady voice, "drawing an image of blue skies and a cloud."
Next, he instructs me to picture red, the feeling of heat, as his hands brush against my shoulder blades.
I hang there, dutifully trying to see the blue sky, the clouds, the blue bubbles, the red heat.
"Open your eyes," he finally commands.
"How do you feel?" he asks. "Enjoyable? Were you able to feel any warmth with the red or coolness with the blue?"
Sheepishly, I admit I was blocked.

"In your case it was anxiety," he nods knowledgeably. "It's because regardless of me explaining what it is, you have years of programming what it's supposed to be. Even though this is an exercise, you're thinking, 'What if he turns the switch that gives him power over me?' When in truth, you never are out of control."

Just then, I look down at my hands, which are still glued to my lap.
"You can move them," he says, laughing.
I do so - but it takes all my will power.
The fact that my hands were so relaxed, he says, is a small indicator that the process had begun.
"There is no difference with what you were doing and achieving the deepest levels," he says. "Once you get can activate a reaction and see things in your mind's eye, you're on your way."

Fast Facts
WHO: Hypnotist Robert Kennzington
WHEN: 8:30 nightly, through Sept. 20
WHERE: Sahara Hotel-Casino
TICKETS: $24.95
INFORMATION: Call 737-2515