by Hazel Flynn
Priscilla was highly trained and extremely experienced, with chorus roles in lots of big-production musicals, including West Side Story, which is maybe the most challenging musical in terms of dance. She had a great energy about her and we really clicked — so much so that what we’d set up as a one-hour meeting stretched into three hours of conversation about anything and everything. I couldn’t help noticing how pretty she was, but I was seeing someone (and so was she, I learned when we got to know each other a little better), so we kept it all very professional.
We agreed we could work very well together and set a date to begin rehearsals. I didn’t know for sure I was going to be in the semi-finals let alone the finals, but I couldn’t just sit back and wait. Priscilla would have to learn the entire routine from scratch, including how to operate unfamiliar apparatus, and that would take time. We arranged to use the hall at Mum’s school and started rehearsing. I’d worked with talented dancers before but Priscilla was on a whole other level. She picked things up incredibly quickly and was so resilient and ready to work. I knew very quickly that if we got the chance to perform the routine it would blow people away.
The announcement of who would be going through to the semi-finals was rapidly approaching but first I had to hit the road to start the Distortions tour, with eight shows scheduled in regional Queensland and Victoria. On the date the AGT production team wanted me in Melbourne for the episode where contestants would be filmed as they learned whether or not they had made it through, I was set to perform in Queensland. The AGT filming was during the day and my show was at night so in theory it was possible to do both. Adam worked out the logistics of getting me down there and back in time. It was tight: running through the airport, arriving back only thirty minutes before curtain tight, but we got away with it. Adam stayed in Queensland to set up the show and John picked me up at Melbourne Airport and drove me to Docklands for the announcement. After my audition success I’d felt 99.9 percent sure I would get through, but it doesn’t pay to take things for granted, so I was genuinely really excited when the judges confirmed my place.
Cosentino family collection (left all); Mark Flynn (right)
Following the plan I’d mapped out for myself, my semi-final act would be Water Trap performed in the new clear box. In our initial discussions the producers advised me against switching back and forth between magic acts and escapes because they thought people would get confused about whether I was a magician or an escape artist. Well that was the whole point, I was both! I heard the faint echo of the junior magic club teacher telling me not to mix magic and dance and I made the same decision I had back then: to trust my instinct. I thought the audience would be smarter than they were being given credit for and that they would understand me perfectly well.
Rehearsing Water Trap turned out to be harder than I could ever have guessed. It should have been a breeze. Doing Anchored I’d been able to hold my breath for up to four minutes at a depth of five metres while moving around. That was the equivalent of a seven-minute static (unmoving) breath-hold, which was just a minute under the world record at the time. In fact, John and I had actually tossed around the idea of putting in the six months’ training needed for me to try setting a new record, before letting the idea go. Twelve months had passed since then, but even so holding my breath for just two minutes, which is all Water Trap required, seemed like a simple task. After all, I’d done it night after night during the Threshold tour.
The complication was that this time I’d be performing it in full view and it needed to look spectacular. Have you ever been to the circus and seen a tightrope walker almost lose their footing? If the person you’re watching is a pro, the chances are high that seeming slip was deliberate and well-controlled. The human mind is a funny thing. Most people looking at an incredibly fit, superbly trained athlete walking a wire twenty metres up in the air with perfect grace will take the skill and artistry for granted: Yes, very impressive. Next? But if the performer throws in a pretend near-fall suddenly the crowd is gripped. Not because they are sadists hoping for an accident but because they’ve been reminded how hard the act actually is and what’s at stake. Previously when I’d done Water Trap I had been mostly out of sight in the metal drum as I worked calmly and methodically through the handcuffs and locks in a genuine escape. But no matter how real my skills were, calm and methodical wasn’t going to cut it on TV. We needed to add ‘the wasabi’, which meant making the movements bigger and (literally) splashier.
We came up with a sequence of big, sharply defined movements that looked great but were the opposite of energy-efficient — in fact, I was tearing through oxygen. I pushed through, working hard at the gym to get lean muscles and practising in the tank whenever I could. If I didn’t have a school show or admin to take care of or PR packages to send out I would sit in the empty tank doing breath-hold training by myself. When Dad, John and Adam finished work they would join me, we’d fill the tank and I’d do it for real. As I had done previously I gradually layered the elements: water, locks, grill over the top, and finally the hands cuffed through the grill. Over the course of a month I built up my capacity but it was so exhausting to perform that I could do no more than three runs-through of the two-minute escape in a session.
One evening about three weeks into the training period and less than a week before the filming date for my semi-final, I finished the escape, broke the surface and was starting to climb out when everything went black. The next thing I knew John and Adam had hold of me and were pulling me out of the box. I’d passed out and slipped back under the water. It was the dreaded shallow water blackout. If they hadn’t responded so quickly the consequences could have been terrible.
Mum didn’t always come to rehearsals but unfortunately on that particular evening she was there and saw the whole thing. She was horrified, despite Dad’s attempts to reassure her by saying it was just that I’d pushed things too far and we wouldn’t let it happen again. The worry she felt for me made her angry. She said, ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this to yourself! I don’t understand why you would put yourself at risk like this!’ I tried to mollify her, telling her nothing like this had happened before and it wouldn’t happen again, that everything would be fine from now on. But in truth I was badly shaken.
The next night I was chained and cuffed as usual with the locked grill above me but I only got about thirty seconds into the escape when I started freaking out. My heart was pounding, I couldn’t stand being in there a second longer. I gave my emergency ‘Pull me out’ signal to John and Adam and they couldn’t get the grill off fast enough for my liking. They were surprised but gave me some space. I took a few minutes, focused on my breathing and tried to get back into the right frame of mind. Then we went again. This time they didn’t even get the locks on the grill before I had to get out.
Normally during underwater escapes I could play a nice little mental game. I could dismiss thoughts of drowning by saying to myself, ‘You’re fit and healthy, you’ve trained hard, you know exactly what you’re doing, you can hold your breath for the equivalent of seven minutes, you’re going to be fine.’ I could send part of my mind off to run through alphabet games and keep the rest focused and calm. But now I kept getting derailed by fearful thoughts about blacking out. I’d start the usual self-talk — ‘Everything’s in place, you’re going to be fine’ — but then a panicky thought would interrupt: ‘What if I’m not fine? What if I have another shallow water blackout? There were no warning signs. What if it happens again? What if it happens on TV?’
This went on for three days. I went back to basics: water in the tank but no shackles, no cuffs, no grill. But no matter how simple I made it, I just couldn’t shut down the gremlin voices of fear. Everyone was very understanding with me at first but as the days passed John started to get annoyed. Finally he blew up, saying, ‘Come on, man, what are you doing? Do you want me to get in the bloody tank and show you how to do it? The semi-final is only a few days away. Do you want to go on the s
how and lose, is that what you want?’ I got angry right back at him. Dad and Adam stepped aside and let us yell at each other. John was saying, ‘You’ve come so far. Are you going to let this beat you?’ I was furious. I said, ‘No, it’s not going to beat me, we’re going again right now.’ And we did. I was so angry I didn’t have room to get scared. I went through the whole escape perfectly, thinking, ‘I’ll bloody show you!’ I threw the grill off as I stood up and saw John, Adam and Dad cheering and grinning. I felt good for the first time in days. I’d broken through the fear paralysis and proved to myself I could still do it.
There was a lingering shadow though. I no longer balked at the escape but there was a chink in my mental armour that hadn’t been there before. The escape stunts I did, particularly the underwater ones, relied on me going to what seemed to be the limit of my capabilities and pushing past that limit. I was so in touch with my body and in control of my mind that I felt safe doing that: I was sure I’d know when I was approaching the true, final limit and stop pushing before I did myself any damage. But the shallow water blackout showed me that I was vulnerable. I couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened, so I dealt with it by shifting the focus to what was at stake: a kind of extreme form of Fear of Missing Out. FOMO gets a bad rap, but this time it really helped me. I focused on the fact that if I gave those anxieties and fearful thoughts power it would cost me what might be a life-changing opportunity. My fear of missing out on that was greater than my fear of a recurrence of something that had only happened once in the hundreds of times I had done the escape. In fact, I told myself, what had happened had actually helped me — I’d proved to myself that I could get through it, overcome the fear and regain control. I was about to find out for real whether that was true or not.
‘I don’t care that they stole my idea . . . I care that they don’t have any of their own.’ — Nikola Tesla
Of the eight acts in my semi-final my biggest competition was an unusual piano player called Chooka Parker. Aged sixteen when he auditioned (though his moustache and ‘rough diamond’ persona made him seem older), he had the kind of back-story reality TV thrives on. He was a farm boy who’d been raised in the bush with no TV and no computer, just a piano that he taught himself to play. In his audition he performed a piece he’d told the judges he would make up on the spot. They were crazy about it. Brian McFadden basically told Chooka he was a genius. Kyle Sandilands told him he might well win the whole competition and asked him what he would do with the money. He said he wanted to live on a houseboat with a piano and make up music for the rest of his life, an answer that brought tears to Dannii Minogue’s eyes. Chooka was right up there as an odds-on favourite going into the semi-finals, but my game plan remained the same: to amaze everyone, leaving no doubt that I deserved a place in the finals.
The performances were recorded on a Sunday and aired on a Tuesday, then the contestants came back the following Sunday for the show where it was revealed who had made it through to the next stage. Arriving at 5 a.m. the day before the semi-final filming to set up the equipment for a dry-run rehearsal, I couldn’t help but think wryly how much easier life would be if I was a singer who had nothing more to carry around than sheet music. It took many hours to set up but finally everything was sorted, including some very nice-looking pyrotechnics that would shoot out from the sides of the frame holding the tank aloft as I emerged from the water. These were created for me by pyro master Alan, one of the many techs on the AGT crew I’d met and worked with previously. We talked the same language and they were all happy to go the extra mile for me.
More than once I was told, ‘You’re not the boy next door.’ Too right I’m not. The boy next door can’t escape from a straitjacket while hanging from his ankles.
On the day of filming we were called for 6 a.m. I was scheduled to perform second last, with only Chooka after me. There were no hoses with which to fill up the tank so we had to use water-cooler bottles. That occupied some time but there were still many hours of waiting around. This time it wasn’t about building drama. This kind of filming, with lots of different set-ups, is a long, slow process and I didn’t get on until 7 p.m. It was mentally exhausting to wait so long in a heightened state of competition nerves, trying to focus on my breathing exercises in the knowledge that instead of the usual full minute I took during my own show to empty the carbon dioxide from my lungs, AGT’s time constraints meant I would have just three breaths to attempt it. Finally I was on. I began the act already bound, cuffed at the wrists and ankles and shackled by a chain which ran up from the ankle cuffs and circled my waist, secured by a total of five padlocks. Applying the chains on stage usually added to the drama but that was another thing that had to be dispensed with to save time, although we did pre-record host Grant Denyer checking all the locks and chains to confirm they were real.
Strangely, after such a long build-up to those few crucial minutes and despite never having performed it in clear view of an audience before, I don’t really remember doing the escape itself, although I know it went perfectly. What I’ll never forget is the incredible feeling of defiant exultation as I emerged from the water. Acting purely on instinct I hurled the grill to the ground, threw my hands in the air and let out a huge, triumphant yell. It was one of the great moments of my life — a release of all the tension I’d felt going into the escape so soon after my SWB scare and a vindication of all the effort everyone had put in over the years to get me to that point.
The audience erupted. They rose to their feet and this time so did the judges. Brian McFadden came over from the judges’ table to high-five me. He went on to say what I had done was one of the most extraordinary things he’d ever seen and called me a phenomenon. That was the perfect response and it showed me I’d been right to go with an escape rather than another illusion routine. It just kept getting better. Dannii said, ‘Australia has never, ever had a performer like you.’ (Yes! I thought. I’ve been trying to get that point across for years.) Kyle was every bit as enthusiastic, saying among other things, ‘It’s world-class standard. I know I’m going to see you up on the big billboards in Vegas one day.’
Grant Denyer followed up by asking, ‘What really sets you apart on a world scale?’ I spoke from the heart when I answered, ‘I’m really pushing the limits: I do the magic, I do the illusions, I do the dance, I do the escapes. This is still just a little bit of what I have to show . . . You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!’ The whole thing was one of those rare, glorious, golden moments when everything falls perfectly into place.
Well that’s how it felt doing it, but I was keen to see how it all came together in the finished show. I watched it go to air from a motel in rural Victoria, where I was back on the road doing school shows with Stacie. It looked just as good as it had felt and I was confident about securing the public phone-in votes needed to get me through to the next round. But then I made a huge error, a really catastrophic one. I read the comments in response to the clip of my act posted on YouTube and Facebook. Some of them were lovely but some were so hateful I was truly horrified. There were vitriolic remarks about every single thing you could name to do with me and the escape: my hair, my body, the way I talked, the fact that people ‘knew’ I was cheating. I swung between feeling sick and burning with anger. I’d worked so hard to be the real thing, achieving something that would have been impossible for most other people on the planet, but instead of enjoying it, or even ignoring it, these haters and trolls wanted to tear me down for it.
My first mistake was reading any of these comments, my second was continuing to read on when I saw what they were like. A long, long time later I came to understand that the people who post these comments have nothing worthwhile to contribute; lashing out is the only way they can get attention. The best thing anyone in the public eye can do is to ignore them, depriving them of the oxygen they seek. But I didn’t know that back then and I stayed up for hours reading this bile. I went from the huge high of the performance two days earlier to terrible self-doubt:
what if this is how the majority of people feel? Am I about to get eliminated because everyone hates me? One of the most beautiful, special moments of my career was stolen from me because I let myself get sucked down that drainhole and let the haters who lived there get the better of me.
The school show we did the following morning should have been enough to show me my fears were unfounded. Most of the kids watched AGT and they thought what I’d done was fantastic. They reacted to me like they had a rock star in their midst, but I was still too upset to really enjoy the moment. Later that day I vowed to myself I would never again give those people that kind of power; I would never again read those kinds of posted comments. I persuaded Adam and John, who were outraged on my behalf, to adopt the same approach.
By the following Sunday the AGT votes had been tallied and we semi-finalists gathered to find out who had made it through and who was being eliminated. The previous year there had been thirty-three acts in four semi-finals. Two had gone through from each — one public pick and one judges’ pick — and those eight competed in the final to determine the overall winner. But in 2011 it ran differently. We’d already had two more semi-finals, resulting in fifteen extra semi-finalists, when Grant Denyer surprised us all by announcing that because there were ‘so many great acts this year’, three acts rather than two would go through from each semi-final. That would put eighteen of us into a two-part ‘finals showdown’.
Chooka Parker and I topped the public vote from our group and the judges picked a barbershop quartet called Benchmark as the third act. There was speculation in the media that three acts going through was a sign the season would be extended somehow, in order to capitalise on the massive ratings AGT was getting. It was so big that year it was slaying even MasterChef Australia. In the early stage of the competition the acts being given much of the credit for this were Chooka and fourteen-year-old Justin Bieber-esque singer Jack Vidgen, whose audition clip had gone viral.