I want you to think about the last corporate event you attended. Not the content. The logistics. Think about the moment when a speaker said, “I need a volunteer from the audience.”
What happened? Someone raised their hand. Then there was a pause while they stood up, pushed their chair back, excused themselves past three colleagues, navigated the narrow gap between their table and the next, walked to the stage, climbed three steps, and stood there looking uncertain about where to go. The speaker directed them to a spot. They got settled. Thirty to forty-five seconds passed. Maybe a minute.
Now think about when the segment ended. The volunteer smiled, the audience applauded, and then there was another pause while they walked back, navigated the same gap, excused themselves past the same three colleagues, and sat down. Another thirty to forty-five seconds.
During those transitions, what was happening on stage? Nothing. The performer was standing there, waiting. Maybe making a joke to fill the time. Maybe just smiling at the audience. But the energy of the show was suspended. The momentum was on hold. The room’s attention was split between the performer and the person making their way through a maze of tables and chairs.
This is the energy drain of getting people up and down from the stage. And until I learned to account for it, it was silently undermining every show I did.
The Hidden Cost
Scott Alexander, in his notes on audience participation pacing, makes a point that sounds obvious but is devastating when you actually apply it to your show: if you do not absolutely need someone on stage, leave them in their seat.
The first time I read that, I thought it was about time management. And it is, partly. But the deeper insight is about energy. Every transition — volunteer up, volunteer down — is a mini-interruption in the show’s flow. The audience’s attention, which you have spent minutes carefully building, fractures during the transition. Some people watch the volunteer. Some look at the performer. Some check their phones. The unified focus that makes a live show powerful breaks apart, and you have to reassemble it once the transition is complete.
One transition is manageable. Two is fine. Three starts to feel repetitive. Four or more, and the show begins to feel like a series of interruptions connected by magic, rather than a show of magic that happens to include some audience interaction.
I counted the transitions in my early thirty-minute show. Four participation pieces, each requiring a volunteer to come up and go back down. That was eight transitions. Eight moments where the show’s energy paused, the audience’s attention scattered, and I had to restart the momentum. Eight moments that contributed nothing to the magic or the entertainment. Eight moments of pure logistical overhead.
In a thirty-minute show, those eight transitions consumed roughly five minutes. Five minutes of nothing. Of walking. Of waiting. Of the show being on hold. That is nearly seventeen percent of the total show time spent on logistics rather than performance.
The Vienna Revelation
The moment this really hit me was at a corporate event in Vienna. Large room, two hundred people, dinner tables arranged in a semicircle with the stage at the open end. The room was deep — the back tables were probably thirty meters from the stage.
I called for my first volunteer. A woman at a table near the back enthusiastically raised her hand. I picked her. And then I watched as she stood up, collected her handbag (she did not want to leave it at the table), navigated between five tables, crossed the open dance floor, reached the stage, looked for the steps, climbed the steps, and arrived beside me. The journey took almost a full minute.
During that minute, I did what performers do — I made small talk with the audience, cracked a joke about the long walk, tried to keep the energy up. But I was paddling upstream. The room’s energy was dispersing with every second of the transit. By the time the volunteer was beside me, I had to rebuild the energy from a lower baseline than where I had been when I called for a volunteer.
The effect went well. But after the effect, the reverse transit took another forty-five seconds. And the rebuilding that I had done at the start needed to happen again.
When I got back to my hotel that night, I sat with a notebook and asked myself a brutal question about each of my four participation pieces: does this person actually need to be on stage?
The answer, for two of the four, was no.
The Seat-Based Alternative
Two of my participation pieces required the volunteer to be next to me because of the physical nature of the interaction — they needed to hold something, stand in a particular spot, or be visible to the entire audience during the effect. Those pieces legitimately needed a stage volunteer.
But the other two? One was a mentalism piece where the volunteer’s role was essentially to think of something and confirm a revelation. They did not need to touch anything. They did not need to be in any particular location. They just needed to participate verbally. The other was an effect where the volunteer made a series of choices. Again, verbal. No physical proximity required.
I redesigned both pieces to work with the volunteer staying in their seat.
For the mentalism piece, instead of calling someone to the stage, I walked to the front of the stage, pointed to someone in the third row, and said, “Stand up for a moment. I need your help from right where you are.” They stood up at their table. We did the interaction with me projecting my voice and making eye contact across the room. The effect played exactly the same. The reveal was identical. But the transitions were gone. No walking to the stage. No walking back. The piece was three minutes of pure content instead of five minutes of content padded by two minutes of logistics.
The audience’s experience was, if anything, better. Having the volunteer stand at their table made the effect feel more intimate, more spontaneous, more real. It felt like something that happened in the moment rather than a staged segment. The volunteer’s tablemates — sitting inches from the action — were more invested than they would have been watching from a distance while their colleague stood on a faraway stage.
For the choice-based effect, I did something similar. The volunteer stayed seated. I projected the choices to the full room — everyone could follow along — but the volunteer made the actual decisions. The rest of the audience was invested because they could see the volunteer’s reactions at close range. The effect worked better than it ever had on stage.
The Energy Calculus
After redesigning those two pieces, I noticed an immediate improvement in the overall energy of my show. Not just during the former participation segments. Throughout the entire show. And when I thought about why, the math made perfect sense.
I had eliminated four transitions — two volunteers going up and two coming back down. That saved roughly two and a half minutes of dead time. But more importantly, it eliminated four energy interruptions. Four moments where the audience’s focus scattered and I had to reassemble it.
The show now had only two stage transitions instead of eight. The audience experienced two participation segments on stage — each one feeling special and intentional — and two segments where someone participated from their seat, which felt spontaneous and inclusive. The variety itself was a pacing advantage. The show was not a repeating cycle of bring-someone-up, do-the-trick, send-them-back. It was a mix of formats that kept the audience guessing about what was coming next.
I also noticed something subtler. In the old version, with four volunteers on stage, the participation felt relentless. The audience was constantly processing the social dynamics of a new person joining me under the lights. In the new version, the two seat-based pieces felt completely different from the two stage pieces. The seat-based pieces felt like the entire room was participating, not just one person. This gave the audience a sense of collective involvement that stage participation, paradoxically, does not create.
When someone is on stage, they are separated from the audience. They become a performer, or at least a co-performer. The audience watches them. But when someone participates from their seat, surrounded by their colleagues, still part of the crowd, the boundary between audience and participant blurs. The whole room feels closer to the action.
The Decision Framework
I now use a simple framework to decide whether a participation piece needs a stage volunteer or a seat-based participant.
Does the effect require the volunteer to hold, touch, or physically interact with something? If yes, they need to be on stage. If no, they can stay seated.
Does the effect require the volunteer to be visible to the entire room? If yes — if seeing their face, their reactions, their body language is essential to the piece — they need to be on stage where everyone can see them. If no — if the participation is primarily verbal or choice-based — they can stay seated.
Does bringing the volunteer on stage add a meaningful visual or dramatic element? Sometimes the act of someone coming up to the stage is part of the drama. It builds anticipation. It creates a moment. If the transit itself serves the show, it is worth the energy cost. If the transit is just logistics, it is not.
Most of the time, when I apply this framework honestly, the answer is that the volunteer does not need to be on stage. Most participation can happen from the audience. The exceptions are the pieces where physical proximity is essential or where the visual of a volunteer on stage creates dramatic impact.
Staggering What Remains
For the pieces that do require stage volunteers, staggering is critical. I never place two stage-participation pieces back to back. There is always a solo piece, a musical number, or a seat-based participation segment between them. This ensures the audience never feels the fatigue of repeated transitions.
In my current forty-five-minute set, I have two stage volunteers and two seat-based participants. The stage volunteers appear at the one-third mark and the two-thirds mark. The seat-based participants fill the spaces between. The result is a show that feels highly interactive — four participation moments in forty-five minutes — without ever subjecting the audience to the energy drain of constant transitions.
The staggering also helps with a practical issue: scouting. If I am going to bring someone on stage, I want to have a sense of who they are before I call them up. Are they likely to be cooperative? Are they mobile? Are they sober? During the solo and seat-based pieces, I can scan the room and identify good candidates for the next stage segment. Without the stagger, I would be choosing blind.
The Invisible Improvement
The beautiful thing about reducing transitions is that the audience never notices the improvement. They do not think, “Wow, this show has very efficient logistics.” What they notice is that the show feels tight, energetic, and alive. That they were never bored, never waiting, never watching someone awkwardly navigate between tables.
The improvement is invisible because it is the removal of something negative rather than the addition of something positive. The audience does not miss the transitions they never experienced. They just enjoy a show that flows.
This is a principle I have encountered repeatedly in my consulting work. The most powerful improvements are often subtractive rather than additive. You do not make a presentation better by adding more slides. You make it better by removing the slides that are not earning their place. The same applies to show structure. You do not make a show better by adding more participation. You make it better by removing the participation that does not absolutely need to happen on stage.
If you do not absolutely need them on stage, leave them in their seats. It is one of the simplest pieces of advice I have ever received about performance. And it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that simple does not mean unimportant. Sometimes the simplest advice is the advice that transforms everything.