There is a moment in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony — you know the one, everyone knows the one, da-da-da-DUM — where the orchestra drops to almost nothing. The massive, crashing, world-shaking opening gives way to a passage that is so quiet you have to strain to hear it. The strings are whispering. The melody is tentative. The energy that shook the concert hall moments ago has retreated to a thread.
And then it comes back. And when it comes back, it comes back enormous. It comes back with a force that would not be possible if the quiet passage had not preceded it. The silence made the sound louder. The retreat made the advance more powerful. The rest made the peak higher.
I think about this a lot, because for the first eighteen months of performing, I was terrified of silence. I was terrified of any moment in my show where the energy dipped, where the audience was not actively engaged, where nothing impressive was happening. I treated every second as a competition for attention, and I filled every second accordingly. The result was a show that was impressive, exhausting, and ultimately forgettable — because when everything is a peak, nothing is.
The Fear of Losing Them
Let me tell you where this fear came from, because I suspect many performers share it.
I come from consulting. In a consulting presentation, you have about ninety seconds before the senior partners start checking their phones. If your opening slide does not grab them, if your first data point does not intrigue them, if your opening statement does not promise something worth their next forty-five minutes, you have lost the room. And once you have lost the room, getting them back is nearly impossible.
I carried this anxiety directly into performing. The audience must be engaged at all times. The audience must be impressed at all times. The moment the energy dips, the moment there is a pause, the moment the show breathes — that is when they check their phones, start whispering to their neighbor, mentally leave the room.
So I designed my show to have no rest periods. Every transition was brisk. Every piece launched immediately from the applause of the previous one. The pacing was relentless. I was performing as if I were being chased — which, emotionally, I was. I was being chased by the fear that if I slowed down for even ten seconds, the audience would realize they were watching an amateur and tune out.
The result was a show that a friend of mine — a musician, not a magician — described after seeing it as “like being in a car with someone who drives at a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour and never touches the brake.” He meant it as concern, not compliment. “It was exciting,” he said. “But I was relieved when it was over.”
That is not the reaction you want.
The Musical Lesson
Music saved me from myself on this one.
I have always been deeply into music — it is my other passion besides magic, the one I could not bring on the road, which is partly why I picked up a deck of cards in the first place. And when my musician friend gave me that feedback, something connected in my mind that had not connected before.
In music, rests are notated. They are written into the score. They have specific durations. They are not absences of music — they are music. A rest is as much a compositional choice as a note. The silence between phrases is what gives the phrases shape. Without the rests, music is noise.
I knew this. I had known this for years. But I had never applied it to my show, because somewhere in my mind I had filed performance under “presentation” rather than under “music.” And presentations, in my consulting-trained brain, do not have rests. Presentations have content delivered at maximum density.
But shows are not presentations. Shows are experiences. And experiences, like music, need rests.
Ken Weber gets at this when he talks about varying the texture and intensity of a show. He uses the phrase “a blur of great magic is still a blur” — the idea that relentless impressiveness defeats itself. If every moment is extraordinary, no moment is extraordinary, because the audience has no baseline against which to measure the extraordinary. The rest periods provide that baseline. They are the ground floor from which the peaks rise.
When I finally internalized this — not just understood it intellectually but felt it in my body during a performance — it changed the architecture of my show more profoundly than almost any other single insight.
The Salzburg Experiment
I decided to test it deliberately. A corporate show in Salzburg, about seventy people. A crowd I had worked for before, so I knew the baseline reaction.
I took my existing set and inserted two intentional rest periods. Not long ones. Maybe sixty to ninety seconds each. The first came after my second piece — a high-energy, interactive effect that usually got the biggest laugh in the show. Instead of riding that energy directly into piece three, I paused. I set down my props. I leaned on the table and told a short story. Not a setup for the next effect. Just a story. Something personal, something real, something that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with connecting with the audience as a human being.
The energy in the room shifted. It came down from the high of the previous piece and settled into something warmer, something more intimate. People’s shoulders relaxed. The laughter faded into smiles. The room felt smaller, closer.
Then I picked up my props and began the next piece. And the reaction to piece three — a piece I had performed dozens of times to reliably good responses — was stronger than I had ever experienced. Noticeably stronger. The audience did not just react to the effect. They reacted to the return of intensity after the quiet moment. The contrast did the work.
The second rest period came between pieces four and five — between my penultimate piece and my closer. This one was even more important, because it gave the audience time to process the penultimate effect before the final build began. I used this rest to talk about what the evening had meant to me. Again, personal. Again, genuine. Again, nothing to do with magic.
And then the closer. Which landed harder than it had ever landed, not because I performed it differently but because the audience arrived at it from a different place. They arrived from rest, from quiet, from a human moment that had nothing to do with impossibility. The contrast between that intimacy and the spectacle of the closer created an impact that no amount of relentless energy could have produced.
I sat in my hotel room that night — Salzburg, a clean little room near the Altstadt — and wrote in my notebook: “The rests made the peaks higher. Not metaphorically. Actually higher. Measurably stronger reactions. The music analogy is not an analogy. It is a direct correspondence.”
Why Performers Resist Rest Periods
I understand the resistance, because I felt it intensely.
The first reason is fear. Rest periods feel like vulnerability. When you are performing a strong effect, you are in control. The audience is reacting to what you are doing. But during a rest period, you are just standing there being a person. If the audience is not engaged by you as a person — by your stories, your warmth, your humanity — then the rest period is just dead air. And dead air is the performer’s nightmare.
This fear is legitimate. If you have not developed the ability to be genuinely interesting and authentic when you are not performing magic, then rest periods will be painful. But that is not an argument against rest periods. It is an argument for developing your off-magic persona until the rest periods become strengths rather than liabilities.
The second reason is ego. Performers want to be impressive. Rest periods are not impressive. They are ordinary. And ordinary feels like failure to a performer who has invested thousands of hours in being extraordinary. But the extraordinary needs the ordinary to exist. A diamond displayed on a velvet cloth looks like a diamond. A diamond displayed on a pile of other diamonds looks like a rock.
The third reason is misunderstanding of what engagement means. Many performers confuse engagement with stimulation. They think the audience is engaged only when they are being stimulated — when something impressive is happening, when they are laughing, when they are gasping. But engagement is broader than stimulation. An audience can be deeply engaged during a quiet story. They can be more engaged during a genuine, personal moment than during a technically demanding effect. Engagement is about attention and emotional investment, and rest periods — done well — increase both.
How to Design Rest Periods That Work
The key distinction is between a rest period and dead time. A rest period is intentional. It is designed. It has a purpose and a shape. Dead time is the absence of anything. It is the awkward pause while you fumble for a prop, the rambling transition while you try to remember what comes next, the empty moment where the audience’s attention floats free because nothing is holding it.
Rest periods work when they accomplish three things simultaneously.
First, they provide emotional recovery. After a high-energy piece, the audience needs time to process what they just experienced. The rest period gives them that time. It says: that was big. Let it land. You do not have to be ready for the next thing yet.
Second, they deepen connection. The rest period is when the audience gets to know the performer as a person, not as a performer. This is where your humanity shows through. Your stories. Your observations. Your vulnerability. The things that make them like you, not just admire you. And liking the performer is what transforms admiration into investment, which is what makes the next peak hit harder.
Third, they create contrast. The rest period establishes a new baseline from which the next peak will rise. The lower the baseline, the higher the peak feels. This is not manipulation. It is architecture. You are designing the topography of the audience’s experience, and topography requires valleys as well as mountains.
Practically, I have found that sixty to ninety seconds is the right duration for most rest periods. Long enough to create a genuine shift in energy. Short enough that the audience does not start wondering if the show is over. The content should be personal, genuine, and engaging on its own terms — not just filler until the next effect.
I tell stories. Real ones. About my consulting work, about learning magic as an adult, about the absurdity of practicing card moves in hotel rooms at midnight. These stories connect to the themes of the show without being setups for specific effects. They are there to be themselves — to be genuine human moments in a show full of impossible ones.
The Architecture of Breathing
I now think of my show as a breathing organism. Inhale: energy rises, effects build, the audience is stimulated and challenged. Exhale: energy settles, stories are told, the audience rests and connects. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Each breath deeper than the last. Each exhale a little lower, each inhale a little higher, until the final inhalation — the closer — takes the audience to the summit.
This is not a metaphor I invented. It is what every great piece of music does. Every great film. Every great novel. The rhythm of tension and release, intensity and rest, stimulation and recovery. It is the fundamental architecture of human experience, and it applies to a thirty-minute magic show in a conference room in Salzburg just as much as it applies to a symphony in a concert hall.
The rests are not wasted time. They are not compromises. They are not concessions to the audience’s limited attention span. They are structural elements as essential as the peaks themselves. Without them, the peaks are just noise. With them, the peaks are music.
My musician friend saw me perform again about four months after his initial feedback. After the show, he said one thing: “You learned how to breathe.”
He was right. And the show was immeasurably better for it.