I want to tell you about a specific kind of silence.
Not the silence of confusion, where the audience does not understand what just happened. Not the silence of disappointment, where the audience expected more. Not the awkward silence of a joke that did not land.
This is the silence of awe. It is the silence that happens when an audience sees something that does not just violate their expectations but seems to suspend the rules of the world entirely. They do not gasp. They do not laugh. They do not clap. They hold their breath and stare, and in that held breath is something close to reverence.
I first experienced this silence as an audience member, watching a performer at a private showcase in Vienna. An object floated. It did not jump or flash or appear in an impossible location. It rose, slowly, off the surface it was resting on and hung in the air, unsupported, while the performer stood at a distance with his hands clearly empty.
The room went quiet in a way I had never experienced in a magic context. No one reached for their phone. No one turned to their neighbor to whisper “Did you see that?” Everyone just watched. For maybe ten seconds, thirty-odd people held their breath together, united in the shared experience of witnessing something that felt genuinely otherworldly.
When the object settled back down, the applause was different too. Not the sharp, reactive clap of surprise. A softer, slower response, as if the audience needed a moment to return from wherever the levitation had taken them before they could respond normally.
I walked out of that showcase knowing two things. First, I wanted to incorporate a levitation into my own work. Second, I had no idea how to make that kind of moment happen in the environments where I typically perform.
The Sustained Impossibility
When I started studying Scott Alexander’s eight categories of effects, I paid particular attention to his discussion of levitations and animations, because I wanted to understand why the floating effect had hit me so differently from everything else I had seen that night.
The answer, I think, comes down to duration. Most magical effects are punctual impossibilities. They happen in a moment. A card changes — that is a fraction of a second of impossibility. A coin vanishes — impossible for an instant. A prediction is revealed to match — one beat of cognitive dissonance.
A levitation is a continuous impossibility. The object floats, and it keeps floating. The impossibility is not a moment but a state. For as long as the object hangs in the air, the rules of gravity are suspended. The audience is not processing a past-tense event (“that just happened”) but witnessing a present-tense impossibility (“that is happening right now”).
This changes the quality of the experience. Punctual impossibilities create surprise — a sharp spike of “What?” that peaks and fades. Continuous impossibilities create wonder — a sustained plateau of “How is that possible?” that deepens the longer it lasts. Surprise makes you react. Wonder makes you contemplate.
Both have value. A show needs surprise and wonder. But wonder is rarer, harder to create, and more memorable. When I ask people what they remember most about a magic show they saw years ago, they almost never describe a card trick. They describe the moment something floated.
My Experiments with Floating
I started experimenting with levitation effects about a year into my serious performing life. I had been building my show around card magic and mentalism — effects that work well in almost any environment. Cards do not need special lighting. Mentalism does not require specific angles. Both categories are robust, portable, and reliable in corporate settings.
Levitations are none of these things.
My first attempt at incorporating a floating effect into my set was at a private event in Innsbruck. A smaller crowd, maybe thirty people, in a conference room that had been rearranged for an after-dinner performance. I had scouted the room earlier in the day and thought the conditions were workable.
They were not.
I will not discuss the method — that is a line I do not cross, ever — but I will say that levitation effects are among the most environment-dependent effects in all of magic. The lighting has to be right. The angles have to be right. The background has to be right. The distance between performer and audience has to be right. In a dedicated theater or a purpose-built performance space, these variables can be controlled. In a conference room in Innsbruck that was serving double duty as a dining room, they cannot.
The effect worked in the technical sense — the object floated. But it did not create the silence I was chasing. The audience reacted with mild interest rather than the breathless awe I had experienced in Vienna. And I knew immediately why: the conditions had not been ideal, and the magic of a levitation lives entirely in the conditions being perfect.
This was a humbling lesson. I had spent weeks preparing the routine, and the environment undid most of my preparation in a matter of seconds. Not because of any failure on my part, but because levitations demand a level of environmental control that most corporate performance settings simply do not offer.
The Quality of Mystery
Despite that early frustration, I did not abandon levitations. I could not. The quality of reaction they produce when the conditions are right is too valuable to leave on the table.
What I did instead was become much more selective about when and where I use them.
I perform primarily at corporate events, keynotes, and private functions. These environments vary enormously. Some are elegant ballrooms with controlled lighting and a proper stage. Some are conference rooms with fluorescent overhead lights and floor-to-ceiling windows. Some are outdoor venues where wind and sunlight make certain effects impossible.
I learned to assess each venue for levitation viability as part of my advance preparation. Lighting, sightlines, background surfaces, audience proximity — all of these factors have to align. If they do, a levitation goes into the set. If they do not, it stays out. There is no compromise. A mediocre levitation is worse than no levitation at all, because a mediocre levitation actively damages the sense of mystery you are trying to create. It draws attention to the conditions rather than the impossibility.
When I can use a levitation, though, the effect on the overall show is disproportionate to the time it occupies. A floating moment might last fifteen to twenty seconds in a thirty-minute show. But those fifteen seconds change the entire texture of the evening. They add a dimension of mystery that no other category provides.
Here is what I mean by that. Card tricks, however beautiful and impossible, are bounded by the medium. The audience knows they are watching someone do something clever with a deck of cards. Mentalism effects are bounded by psychology — the audience assumes, even when they cannot explain it, that some form of psychological technique is at work. These boundaries do not diminish the effects, but they contain them within a comprehensible framework.
A levitation breaks the framework. When something floats, the audience cannot default to “He’s good with cards” or “He must be reading body language.” They have to confront the possibility, however briefly, that something genuinely unexplainable is happening. That confrontation is what creates the silence. That confrontation is what makes levitations feel like real magic rather than skilled entertainment.
Animation: The Living Object
Closely related to levitations are animations — effects where an object moves on its own. Not floating, necessarily, but exhibiting independent motion. A ball that rolls across a table without being touched. An object that turns over by itself. Something that responds to the performer’s gestures as if it has a will of its own.
Animations are, in some ways, even more unsettling than levitations. A levitation is extraordinary but static — the object floats in place. An animation implies agency. The object is not merely defying gravity; it is behaving as if it is alive. This is uncanny in the original Freudian sense — the familiar made strange. A ball is a mundane object. A ball that moves on its own is deeply, instinctively unsettling, in a way that is thrilling rather than frightening.
I have used animation effects sparingly, but when I have used them, the audience reaction has been unlike anything I get from other categories. People do not just wonder how it was done. They wonder what they just saw. There is a philosophical dimension to animation effects that transcends the technical, and it touches something primal in human cognition — our deep-seated tendency to attribute agency to moving objects.
The One Floating Moment
If I could give one piece of advice to a performer building a varied show, it would be this: find a way to include one floating moment.
Not necessarily a full levitation routine. Not necessarily something that requires elaborate environmental preparation. Even a brief, contained moment where something defies gravity — a card that hovers for a second, an object that rises an inch off a surface — adds a quality to your show that no other category can replicate.
The reason is tonal. I have written in previous posts about the importance of variety in a show, the way different categories of effects create different emotional textures. Transformations create surprise. Penetrations create physical astonishment. Mentalism creates intellectual impossibility. Levitations create mystery. And mystery is the texture that most shows are missing.
Most magic shows are impressive. The audience walks away thinking the performer is skilled, clever, entertaining. That is good. That is the baseline. But mystery is something different. Mystery is the feeling that something happened that cannot be explained, not just by the audience but by anyone. It is the feeling that, for a moment, the world did not work the way the world is supposed to work.
A show without mystery is a display. A show with mystery is an experience.
What Levitations Taught Me About Environmental Awareness
Working with levitation effects forced me to become dramatically more attentive to my performing environment. Before floating effects, I would show up to a venue, do a quick check for stage space and power outlets, and perform. The room was a container for my show, not a variable in it.
Levitations changed that. Suddenly, I was arriving at venues hours early, studying the lighting, walking the sightlines from every seat, checking background colors, monitoring ambient light from windows. I was thinking about the room as an instrument — something that could amplify or diminish the effects I was planning to perform.
This environmental awareness spilled over into everything. I started noticing how acoustics affected my vocal delivery, how seating arrangement shaped sight lines, how the room’s layout could make a volunteer’s journey to the stage smooth or awkward. Levitations forced me to become a better performer overall because they forced me to see the environment as part of the performance.
So even if you never perform a levitation — even if your show is entirely cards and mentalism and comedy — think about your performing environment the way a levitation demands. Walk the room. Check the angles. Study the light. The environment is not the background of your show. It is a character in it.
Levitations just made me notice sooner.