I want to talk about a specific performer doing a specific thing, because sometimes the general principles become so much clearer when you watch them in action.
The performer is Kreskin. The thing is borrowed ring linking. And the lesson is one that has fundamentally changed how I think about what it means to capture an audience’s attention.
What Most Performers Do
Let me describe what borrowed ring linking typically looks like when a competent, professional magician performs it. The performer borrows a ring from a spectator. The ring is linked onto something — a chain, a key ring, another ring. The audience reacts. The performer returns the ring. Everyone claps. Next effect.
The whole sequence might take ninety seconds. It is clean, efficient, and professional. The audience is briefly surprised. The performer is satisfied. Everyone moves on.
There is nothing wrong with this version. It works. People enjoy it. It is a perfectly serviceable piece of magic.
But it is not what Kreskin does.
What Kreskin Does
When Kreskin borrows a ring, the entire dynamic of the room changes. I have watched recordings of him performing this type of effect, and what strikes me every time is how much weight he gives the moment. How much he invests.
He does not just take the ring. He asks whose ring it is. He asks how long they have had it. He acknowledges the significance of the object — this is not a prop he bought from a magic shop, this is something that belongs to a real person with a real attachment to it. He treats the ring as what it actually is: someone’s possession, entrusted to a stranger.
Then he builds. Slowly. He creates anticipation not by rushing toward the effect but by slowing down toward it. His voice changes. His body language shifts. The audience can feel that something is being taken seriously — that this is not a casual demonstration but an event that the performer himself finds significant.
By the time the effect happens, the audience is fully invested. They care. Not just about the puzzle of how it was done, but about the ring, the person who owns it, and the moment itself. The applause is not polite surprise. It is the release of genuine tension.
The Difference Is Not the Trick
Here is what I find so instructive about this comparison. The mechanical reality of what is happening is, in both cases, essentially the same. A ring links onto something. That is the effect. The audience sees the same impossible thing.
But the experience is utterly different. One version produces a brief “huh, that’s clever.” The other produces a room-wide moment of genuine astonishment. Same effect. Different experience.
The difference is entirely in the presentation. In how the performer treats the moment. In the signals the performer sends about whether this is something casual or something important.
Kreskin treats it as important. He signals to the audience, through every tool at his disposal — voice, pace, body language, eye contact, the words he chooses — that what they are about to witness deserves their full attention. And because he treats it as important, they do too.
The competent professional treats it as one effect among many. Efficient. Clean. And forgettable.
My Own Ring Moment
I perform with borrowed objects from time to time — not always rings, but watches, phones, personal items. And for a long time, I treated these moments exactly the way I just described the competent professional treating them. I borrowed the item, did the effect, returned the item. Quick, clean, professional.
Then I started experimenting with weight.
At a private event in Salzburg, I borrowed a watch from a gentleman in the front row. Instead of immediately proceeding to the effect, I paused. I looked at the watch. I asked him if it was a gift. He said his wife had given it to him for their anniversary. I acknowledged that — not performatively, not as a scripted beat, but genuinely. “That’s a significant object to trust to a stranger,” I said. “I appreciate that.”
The room shifted. I could feel it. Suddenly the audience was not watching a trick. They were watching something that had stakes. The watch was not a prop. It was a real object with real meaning, and someone had just entrusted it to me.
What followed was the same effect I had been performing for months. But the audience reaction was categorically different. Bigger. Warmer. More invested. Because I had taken thirty seconds to establish what the object meant, the effect itself carried more weight.
Thirty seconds. That is all it took to transform a competent piece of magic into something that felt like it mattered.
Why Performers Skip This Step
I have thought about why most performers — myself included, for too long — skip the weight-building step. I think there are a few reasons, and none of them are good.
The first is pace anxiety. We are afraid of slowing down. We have internalized the idea that entertainment must keep moving, that any pause is a risk, that the audience will lose interest if we do not continuously feed them new information. So we rush through the setup to get to the effect, because the effect is where the magic is. Right?
Wrong. The effect is where the secret is. The magic is in the experience, and the experience is built in the moments before the effect. The setup is not an obstacle to the magic. The setup IS the magic.
The second reason is ego. Specifically, the performer’s desire to demonstrate skill. When you are proud of what you can do — and you should be, if you have put in the work — there is a temptation to get to the impressive part quickly. Look at this. Watch what I can do. The borrowed ring links. See? The ego wants the audience to see the skill, and the skill lives in the moment of impossibility, so the ego races toward that moment.
But the audience does not experience skill in isolation. They experience skill in context. And the context is everything that came before the moment of impossibility. Without context, the skill is just a puzzle. With context, it is an event.
The third reason is the most insidious: we do not realize we are throwing the moment away. We have seen ourselves perform the effect so many times that it has become routine. We know it works. We know the audience will react. We have unconsciously downgraded the moment from extraordinary to normal, and that downgrade leaks into our performance. We treat it casually because, for us, it IS casual. We have done it a thousand times.
But the audience has never seen it. For them, this is the first time. And if the performer cannot find a way to experience the first-time quality of the effect even after the thousandth repetition, the audience will mirror that casualness. They will treat it as ordinary because the performer has told them, through a hundred nonverbal signals, that it IS ordinary.
The Investment Principle
What Kreskin understands — what I am still learning to understand — is that the performer’s investment in a moment directly determines the audience’s investment in that moment.
This is not a metaphor. It is a measurable, observable dynamic. When a performer leans in, slows down, changes their voice, gives the moment weight, the audience mirrors that investment. They lean in. They quiet down. They pay closer attention. They care more.
When a performer breezes through a moment, the audience breezes through it too. Not because they are unimpressed. Because the performer has not signaled that there is anything to be especially impressed by.
Darwin Ortiz describes this from a different angle in Strong Magic when he discusses the relationship between prestige and audience investment. The more the performer communicates that what they are doing is significant, the more the audience treats it as significant. Ortiz frames this as a systematic technique rather than a personality trait — it is something you can learn, practice, and deploy deliberately.
I find this framing liberating. It means capturing the excitement is not about being naturally charismatic or having a magnetic personality. It is about developing a specific set of communication skills — voice, pace, body language, word choice — and applying them strategically to the moments that deserve them.
The Borrowed Object Advantage
There is a reason borrowed objects create such fertile ground for this kind of weight-building. A borrowed ring, a borrowed watch, a borrowed phone — these items carry meaning that no prop from a magic shop ever will. They are real objects from real lives, and everyone in the room understands their significance instinctively.
When you borrow someone’s wedding ring, the entire audience holds its breath slightly. Not because of the magic that is about to happen. Because of the vulnerability of the moment. That ring means something. If something goes wrong — and the audience does not know that nothing will go wrong — the consequences are real.
This built-in tension is a gift. It does half the work of building weight for you. The performer who recognizes this and leans into it, who takes the time to acknowledge the significance of the object and the trust being placed in them, multiplies the impact of whatever follows.
The performer who ignores it, who grabs the ring and immediately proceeds to the effect, wastes the most powerful asset in the entire interaction.
Applying This Beyond Borrowed Objects
The principle extends far beyond borrowed items. Every effect has moments that deserve weight, and the performer’s job is to identify those moments and give them the attention they deserve.
A prediction that has been sitting in plain view all evening. The moment you draw attention to that prediction — really draw attention to it, not just gesture toward it — is the moment the audience begins to invest. Slow down. Let them look at it. Let them think about it. Build the frame.
A card that the spectator selected and has been holding throughout the routine. The moment you ask them to turn it over is not a casual transition. It is the fulcrum of the entire piece. Treat it as such.
A name that has been written on a piece of paper and sealed in an envelope. The moment you begin to open that envelope is not a mechanical step. It is the most important ten seconds of the entire performance.
In every case, the principle is the same. The audience does not know which moments are special unless you tell them. Not with words alone — though words help — but with every tool available to you. The pace of your movement. The quality of your voice. The expression on your face. The amount of time you spend.
Time is the most honest communicator of value. We spend time on things that matter to us. When the audience sees you spending time on a moment — not rushing through it, not treating it as a transition to something else, but dwelling in it — they understand that this moment matters. They adjust their attention accordingly.
What Changed for Me
I now run through every performance with a simple question: where are the moments that deserve weight? Not every moment can be heavy. A performance that treats everything as significant treats nothing as significant. The weight must be selective.
But within each routine, there is at least one moment that is the reason the routine exists. One moment where the impossible thing happens, where the audience’s reality shifts. That moment deserves the full force of the performer’s investment.
And the investment must come before the moment, not during it or after it. By the time the card appears in the impossible location, by the time the ring links, by the time the prediction matches — by that point, the audience’s level of investment is already set. If you have built weight, they gasp. If you have not, they nod.
I am still learning to do this consistently. There are nights when I rush, when the pace anxiety takes over, when I treat a meaningful moment as a transition. But I am getting better. And every time I get it right — every time I slow down, build the frame, give the moment its due — the audience tells me immediately. Not with words. With the quality of their silence just before the reveal, and the quality of their reaction just after.
That silence is the sound of investment. And it is, I am learning, the most important sound in all of performance.