Something happened at a show in Vienna about a year ago that fundamentally shifted how I think about performance. It was not a catastrophic failure. It was not a technical error. It was something much more insidious: a moment that should have been extraordinary, and was not.
I was performing a mentalism piece. The structure was clean. I had a volunteer think of something personal, something I could not possibly know. Through a series of interactions — questions, observations, moments of apparent concentration — I arrived at the specific, exact detail they were holding in their mind. The kind of moment that, in theory, should feel like genuine mind reading.
I revealed the information. The volunteer confirmed it. The audience clapped.
And that was it. They clapped. Polite, appreciative applause. The same kind of applause they had given to every other piece in the set. No gasps. No stunned silence. No leaning forward in their seats. No turning to each other with wide eyes. Just: clap, clap, clap. Moving on.
I had just apparently read someone’s mind, and the audience treated it like a competent card trick. As if it were a perfectly nice moment in a perfectly nice show. Nothing to lose sleep over.
The problem was not the effect. The effect was strong. The problem was me. I had delivered the impossible moment as if it were routine. As if reading someone’s thoughts were just another thing on the list. I had moved through the climax with the same energy, the same pacing, the same casual professionalism that I used for everything else. I had not told the audience that what just happened was extraordinary. So they decided it was not.
Pillar Three: Capture the Excitement
This is Weber’s third pillar, and when I first encountered it in Maximum Entertainment, I thought it was the most obvious one. Of course you capture the excitement. Of course you show the audience why what you are doing is special. Who would not do that?
Almost everyone. That is who.
Weber’s observation is devastating in its simplicity: magicians routinely treat their most magical moments as trivial. They rush through the climax to get to the next effect. They deliver the impossible reveal with the same vocal register they used for the setup. They produce four objects in a row, making each one seem easier and less impressive than the last. They treat magic as ordinary. And when the performer treats something as ordinary, the audience has no reason to treat it as anything else.
This is Pillar Three in a sentence: show the audience why what you are doing is special. If you do not, they will assume it is not.
The Hierarchy of Mystery
Weber describes a hierarchy that I find incredibly useful for understanding what goes wrong.
At the bottom level is the puzzle. The audience sees something impossible and their response is: “Huh. How did he do that?” They assume that if they knew the secret, they could do it too. The mystery is a problem to be solved, not an experience to be felt. This is the lowest tier of audience response to magic.
Above that is the trick. The audience perceives skill, expertise, something beyond what an ordinary person could do. They are impressed. They appreciate the demonstration. This is where most professional magic lives — in the space of skilled demonstration that earns respect.
At the top is the extraordinary moment. This is where the audience stops analyzing and starts experiencing. Where the question is not “how did he do that?” but something more primal — a gasp rather than a grasp. Where the impossible does not invite intellectual reconstruction but emotional surrender. Where the audience feels that something genuinely shifted.
Here is the critical insight, and it is the one that changed my approach to performance: all magic, at its core, is a puzzle. The method behind every effect, no matter how sophisticated, can be reduced to a secret that, once known, strips the impossibility bare. The audience does not know this consciously, but they sense it. They know, at some level, that there is a method. That if they were clever enough or attentive enough, they could figure it out.
What elevates a puzzle to a trick, or a trick to an extraordinary moment, is not the method. It is not the complexity or ingenuity of the secret. It is presentation. Presentation alone. How the performer frames the moment. Whether they treat it as routine or revelatory. Whether they rush through it or hold it. Whether they show the audience that what just happened should take their breath away.
The Billiard Ball Problem
I want to give you an example that crystallized this for me. It comes from a principle I encountered in studying performance theory, and while the specific context is a manipulation act, the lesson applies universally.
Imagine a performer who produces a billiard ball from thin air. One ball, appearing at the fingertips. If the performer presents this as a moment of genuine impossibility — where did that come from? how is that possible? — the audience is amazed. An object materialized from nothing. That is extraordinary.
Now the performer produces a second ball. Impressive, but the sense of impossibility has diminished. The audience has already seen one ball appear. The second one expands the trick but does not expand the wonder in the same way.
Third ball. The audience is now watching a pattern. The production has become a demonstration of skill rather than a moment of impossibility.
Fourth ball. The audience is waiting for it. They expect it. The very thing that should be most impressive — the performer now has four objects that appeared from nowhere — has become the least impressive moment. Because repetition without escalation trivializes. Each successive production makes the first one seem easier.
This is what happens when performers fail to capture the excitement. They treat each moment with the same weight, and the weight distributes until nothing feels heavy. The extraordinary becomes ordinary through the performer’s own handling.
My Vienna Diagnosis
After the Vienna show where my mind-reading piece landed flat, I went back to the video. Not looking at technique — looking at my own behavior around the climax.
What I saw was a performer who was already thinking about the next piece. My body language during the reveal was efficient, not dramatic. My voice was the same pitch and volume it had been thirty seconds earlier. I did not pause before the reveal. I did not change my energy. I did not look at the volunteer with the genuine amazement that the moment warranted. I said the information, the volunteer confirmed it, and I moved on.
I treated reading someone’s mind as if it were checking an item off a list.
Compare that to how I would react if I actually read someone’s mind. If I genuinely, inexplicably knew what a stranger was thinking. I would be astonished. I would be speechless for a moment. I would look at the person with something close to wonder. The impossibility of the moment would stop me in my tracks before I could even think about what comes next.
That is the energy the audience needs to see. Not performed wonder — although performed wonder is better than no wonder at all. Genuine investment in the impossibility of what just happened. A signal from the performer that says: this is the moment. This is the thing. Pay attention to what just occurred, because it should not be possible.
The Audience Takes Your Cue
This is perhaps the most important principle in Pillar Three, and the one I wish someone had told me when I started performing: the audience does not know what is special unless you tell them.
In most domains of performance, the audience has an intuitive sense of difficulty. Watching a juggler add a fifth ball, they understand that more balls means more difficulty. Watching a dancer execute a leap, they can feel the athleticism and risk. Watching a singer hit a high note, they sense the vocal range required.
Magic is different. The audience has no reliable framework for difficulty. They do not know which effects are harder than others. They do not know which moments involve the most skill. They do not know whether what they just saw was the equivalent of a juggler keeping three balls in the air or seventeen. They have no reference point.
So they take their cue from the performer. If the performer treats a moment as routine, the audience files it under routine. If the performer treats a moment as extraordinary, the audience opens up to the possibility that it is extraordinary.
This is not about being dramatic or theatrical. It is not about gasping at your own effects or widening your eyes in performed amazement. It is about the subtle, powerful signals that communicate weight: the pause before a reveal. The change in vocal register. The eye contact that holds a beat longer than expected. The breath that says something is about to happen. The silence after the impossible moment that allows it to land, rather than rushing through it to the next thing.
These signals are the difference between magic that the audience solves intellectually and magic that the audience experiences emotionally.
The Corporate Context
This matters particularly in the corporate context where I mostly perform. Corporate audiences are, by nature, analytical. They are problem-solvers. Many of them are consultants, executives, engineers — people whose professional lives involve deconstructing complexity and finding solutions. These audiences are predisposed to treat magic as a puzzle because treating things as puzzles is what they do for a living.
This means the performer must work harder, not less hard, to elevate the experience beyond the puzzle level. If you give a room full of strategy consultants a puzzle, they will try to solve it. That is their instinct. That is their training. And the moment they shift into puzzle-solving mode, the magic evaporates. It becomes a challenge — “I bet I can figure this out” — and the emotional experience is replaced by intellectual competition.
Capturing the excitement is how you prevent that shift. By signalling to the audience that this is not a puzzle to be solved but a moment to be experienced, you give them permission to stop analyzing and start feeling. You redirect their default mode from intellectual to emotional.
I have learned to do this through framing. Before a mentalism piece, I do not say “I am going to try to read your mind” — that is a challenge, and challenges invite resistance. I say something closer to: “Something is about to happen that I still do not fully understand, even after years of doing this.” That framing shifts the dynamic. It tells the audience that even the performer finds this extraordinary. And if the performer finds it extraordinary, perhaps the audience should too.
What Changed in My Performance
Since the Vienna wake-up call, I have restructured how I handle climactic moments. The changes are not dramatic from the outside, but they are profound from the inside.
I slow down before every reveal. Not theatrically. Just enough that the audience registers the change in pace. The body recognizes deceleration as a signal that something important is approaching.
I change my vocal register. Not louder — often quieter. The voice drops slightly. The words become more deliberate. This is counterintuitive, but a quiet voice demands more attention than a loud one. When everyone is leaning in to hear you, they are already emotionally invested.
I hold the moment after the reveal. Instead of moving on immediately, I stay with it. I look at the volunteer. I let the audience see my reaction to what just happened. I give the impossibility time to breathe, time to settle into the room, time for people to turn to each other and process it.
And I stopped treating the magic as ordinary. This was the biggest shift. I had been so focused on appearing professional and competent that I had suppressed my own sense of wonder. I had acted as if reading someone’s mind were just another day at the office. Now I allow myself to be present in the moment, to feel the weight of what is happening, and to let that feeling show.
The Pillar Three Premise
Here is the premise of the posts that will follow in this series: you are responsible for the audience’s experience of your magic. If they experience it as a puzzle, that is your doing. If they experience it as extraordinary, that is also your doing. The effect itself is neutral. It is presentation — and specifically, the performer’s relationship to the moment of impossibility — that determines whether magic is trivial or transcendent.
Anything you treat as trivial will receive a trivial response. Anything you treat as extraordinary has the potential to be received as extraordinary.
This seems obvious. It is not. Because the natural tendency of every performer who has done an effect hundreds of times is to treat it as routine. You have seen the reveal so many times that it no longer amazes you. The impossibility has become familiar. The extraordinary has become your ordinary.
And when that internal trivialization leaks into your performance — through pacing, through energy, through the absence of genuine engagement with the moment — the audience catches it. They see a performer who is not particularly impressed by what he is doing. And they conclude, reasonably, that if the performer is not impressed, why should they be?
Pillar Three is the antidote to this. It is the discipline of treating every performance as if the magic is happening for the first time. Of showing the audience, through your behavior and your energy and your genuine engagement, that what they are witnessing is not ordinary. That it is not routine. That it is, in the literal meaning of the word, extraordinary.
The posts ahead will break this down further — how to build moments, how to avoid the trivialization trap, how to show the audience why magic matters. But the foundation is this: if you do not capture the excitement, no one will. The magic does not speak for itself. You speak for the magic. And what you say — through words, through silence, through how you hold the moment — determines whether the audience remembers a puzzle or an experience.
Make it extraordinary. Because if you do not, no one else will do it for you.