There is a phrase from Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment that has been rattling around in my head for months. He uses it in passing, almost casually, but it captures a problem so perfectly that I have not been able to let it go.
“A blur of great magic is still a blur.”
He is talking about a specific performer — Milburn Christopher, a legendary figure in magic’s history — but the principle applies to every performer who has ever confused smoothness with impact.
The Christopher Problem
Milburn Christopher was, by all accounts, technically brilliant. His handling was impeccable. His transitions were seamless. His pace was brisk and confident. He moved from one effect to the next with the fluid efficiency of a master who had internalized his material so completely that it required no visible effort.
And Weber’s observation is that Christopher’s magic was so smooth, so polished, so efficiently presented that audiences sometimes did not fully register what had happened. The effects flowed past them like water. Each individual moment was technically perfect, but the cumulative experience was a kind of pleasant wash — impressive in the aggregate but lacking individual peaks that grabbed the audience and demanded they stop and feel something.
The magic was invisible. Not in the way magicians aspire to — where the method is invisible but the effect is vivid. In the worst possible way: the effects themselves became invisible. They were so smoothly executed, so quickly presented, so seamlessly transitioned that no single moment had the chance to land with full force.
A blur of great magic is still a blur.
Why This Terrified Me
This terrified me because I recognized the impulse immediately.
When I first started getting comfortable on stage — maybe a year into performing regularly — my instinct was to get smoother. Faster. More efficient. I wanted the transitions to disappear. I wanted the handling to be invisible. I wanted the whole set to flow like a single continuous piece of movement, with no gaps, no pauses, no moments where the machinery was visible.
And I achieved it, to a degree. The sets got tighter. The transitions got cleaner. The pacing got brisker. On video, it looked good. Professional. Polished.
But something was wrong. The audience reactions were not scaling with the polish. In fact, there were nights when the reactions seemed to be inversely correlated with the smoothness. The tighter and more efficient the set became, the more the audience seemed to settle into a comfortable passivity. Watching with interest. Appreciating the competence. But not having their breath taken away.
I could not figure out what was wrong until I read Weber’s description of Christopher and suddenly saw my own tendency reflected back at me.
I was creating a blur.
The Efficiency Trap
Here is the thing about efficiency in performance: it is a virtue that can become a vice. In almost every other domain of my professional life — consulting, business strategy, company building — efficiency is unambiguously good. More output per unit of time. Fewer wasted resources. Streamlined processes. Every management book I have ever read celebrates efficiency.
But performance is not management. Performance is experience design. And experience does not benefit from efficiency the way processes do.
When you make a performance more efficient, you compress time. You eliminate pauses. You tighten transitions. You remove the gaps between effects. And those gaps, those pauses, those moments of apparent inefficiency — they are where the audience processes what they have just seen.
Without processing time, effects accumulate without impact. The audience sees one impossible thing, then immediately sees another, then another. Their cognitive processing cannot keep up. Each new effect displaces the previous one before it has had the chance to fully register. The result is a pleasant haze of impressiveness that resolves into… nothing specific. When someone asks the audience what they saw, the answer is often “he was really good” rather than “this one moment was absolutely incredible.”
“Really good” is the enemy of extraordinary. “Really good” is what you say about a blur.
The Commoditization Effect
There is a concept in business that applies perfectly here: commoditization. When a product becomes so widely available and so interchangeable that consumers stop perceiving meaningful differences between options, the product becomes a commodity. It competes on price rather than on value. It loses its ability to command premium attention.
A blur of great magic commoditizes the effects. When every moment flows into the next at the same pace, the same energy, the same level of treatment, the audience cannot distinguish between the most powerful effect in your repertoire and a simple transition piece. Everything receives the same moderate level of attention. Nothing stands out. Your best material is dragged down to the average, and your average material does not pull up to the best. Everything flattens.
This is what I was doing. I had six effects in my set, and I was presenting them with equal weight, equal pace, equal smoothness. Two of those effects were genuinely strong pieces that deserved the audience’s full, undivided attention. Two were solid middle-of-the-set pieces that served important structural functions. Two were transitions and openers that were never meant to be peaks.
By treating them all the same — by making the whole set one continuous, efficient flow — I was averaging everything. The strong effects were weakened because they did not receive special treatment. The transitions were elevated beyond their station, which meant the audience could not distinguish peak from plateau.
Breaking the Blur
The fix was counterintuitive. I had to make my performance less smooth.
Not less polished. Not less rehearsed. Less smooth. I had to introduce deliberate roughness — moments where the flow stopped, where the pace shifted, where the audience was jolted out of the comfortable blur and forced to pay attention.
This manifested in several ways. The most important was the introduction of pauses. Real pauses. Not the brief catches of breath between effects that I had been using, but genuine, held silences that lasted five seconds, eight seconds, sometimes longer. Pauses where I stood still, looked at the audience, and let the moment breathe.
The first time I tried this — at a show in Vienna — it felt wrong. Every instinct screamed at me to fill the silence, to keep moving, to maintain the flow. Silence felt like failure. It felt like I had forgotten what came next. It felt like the engine had stalled.
But the audience did not experience it as a stall. They experienced it as significance. When everything has been moving and suddenly everything stops, the stop itself carries enormous communicative weight. It says: something important is about to happen. Pay attention. This matters.
And they did pay attention. The effect that followed the pause landed harder than it had ever landed in the smoother version of the set. Not because the effect was better. Because the audience was primed to receive it.
The Staircase Principle
Fitzkee wrote about this decades ago in Showmanship for Magicians — the idea that a performance should be like a staircase, always rising, never descending from a level once gained. But a staircase is not a ramp. A ramp is a continuous, smooth ascent. A staircase has steps — discrete, distinct levels separated by risers.
The risers are the pauses. The transitions. The moments where you stop ascending and consolidate before taking the next step up. Without the risers, you have a ramp, and a ramp feels like a blur. Continuous, smooth, and — crucially — without the satisfying sense of distinct levels being achieved.
Each step on the staircase should feel like an arrival. A moment where the audience registers “we are now here, and here is higher than where we were before.” This requires the performer to treat each step as distinct, to give the audience time to register the change in level, and to signal clearly that the ascent is continuing.
A blur removes the steps. Everything becomes gradient rather than stepped. And while gradients are smooth and elegant, they do not create the satisfying sense of progress that stairs do. They do not give the audience clear moments of arrival.
My Own Staircase Experiment
After reading both Weber and Fitzkee and watching recordings of Kreskin, Copperfield, and Blaine — all of whom use pace variation masterfully — I restructured my set from a flow into a staircase.
Each effect became a step. Between steps, I built explicit transitions that included pauses, shifts in energy, and — where appropriate — brief moments of direct address to the audience. Not patter for the next effect. Just… presence. A moment of being with them before moving on.
The result was a set that was objectively less smooth. The transitions were visible. The pace varied. There were moments where nothing appeared to be happening.
And the audience loved it.
Not loved in the abstract sense. Loved in the specific, measurable sense that the peak moments got bigger reactions, the audience engagement was higher throughout, and the post-show conversations were more specific. Instead of “that was great,” people said “that moment where you stopped and just looked at us before the card changed — I got chills.”
They remembered specific moments. That was the difference. In the blur version, they remembered a general impression. In the staircase version, they remembered peaks. And peaks, not impressions, are what create the stories that audiences tell afterward.
The Speed Misconception
I should be clear about something. This is not about performing slowly. Slow magic can be just as blurry as fast magic if the pace never varies. A performer who does everything at the same slow, deliberate pace creates the same averaging effect as one who does everything at the same brisk pace. The issue is not speed. It is variation.
The most compelling performers I have studied move quickly when quickness serves the moment and slowly when slowness does. They speed up for energy and excitement. They slow down for significance and weight. The variation itself is the signal. It tells the audience where to direct their attention.
Imagine a piece of music that maintains the same tempo throughout. Even if the notes are beautiful, the monotony of pace creates a kind of emotional flatness. Now imagine the same piece with deliberate changes in tempo — accelerating in the exciting passages, decelerating in the emotional ones. The variation creates shape. And shape is what makes an experience memorable.
The Practical Checklist
Since my staircase restructuring, I have developed a simple checklist that I apply to every set:
Where are the peaks? Identify the two or three moments that deserve the audience’s most intense attention.
Do the peaks receive different treatment? If the peaks are presented at the same pace, the same energy, and the same vocal register as the valleys, they are not really peaks. They are just more terrain.
Are there pauses before the peaks? The pause is the most reliable tool for signaling significance. If you are not pausing before your biggest moments, you are robbing those moments of their impact.
Is the pace varied? If the entire set moves at one speed, it is a blur regardless of that speed. Deliberate variation in pace creates shape, and shape creates memorability.
Does the audience have time to process? After a major effect, give them a moment. Let the reaction happen. Let them turn to each other, let them exhale, let them absorb what they just saw. Then — and only then — move on.
These are not revolutionary insights. They are basic principles of dramatic structure that apply to any form of storytelling or performance. But they are remarkably easy to forget when you are focused on smoothness, on efficiency, on making the set flow.
The flow is the enemy. The staircase is the friend. And the blur — however technically impressive — is the thing that turns extraordinary moments into pleasant forgettability.
Milburn Christopher, by all accounts, was an extraordinary magician. His technical mastery was beyond question. But the blur swallowed his magic. And the lesson for every performer who follows is clear: your audience cannot appreciate what they cannot individually perceive. Give each moment its due. Let each effect land. Break the blur.
Your best magic deserves to be seen. Not smoothed away.