There are two fundamentally different ways to light a live performance. You can light the whole room, performer and audience together, or you can light the performer and leave the audience in relative darkness. The first is the corporate default. The second is the theatrical ideal. And the gap between them is not a matter of aesthetics. It is a matter of energy.
I learned this through a series of shows that taught me more about lighting than about any other aspect of production. And what I learned, reduced to its simplest form, is this: bright houselights suck energy from the room. A follow spot gives it back.
The Default Setting
Most corporate events default to full houselights. This is understandable. The event is not only about the entertainment. There are networking moments, dinner service, speeches, awards. The lights need to be on for all of these. When the entertainment starts, no one thinks to change the lights because no one thinks the lights matter.
I certainly did not think they mattered for my first dozen or so shows. I performed in whatever light the venue gave me. Sometimes it was warm and flattering. Sometimes it was the cold blue-white of office fluorescents. Sometimes there were decorative uplights on the walls that created ambiance but did nothing for stage visibility. I took what I got and focused on my material.
Then I performed at a venue that had a follow spot.
The Klagenfurt Revelation
It was a corporate awards evening in Klagenfurt. Nice venue — a converted theater that the company had rented for their annual celebration. The tech crew was professional, the kind that handles live events regularly. When I arrived for the setup, the technical director asked me a question no one had ever asked before: “Do you want a follow spot?”
I said yes without fully understanding what I was agreeing to.
During the performance, the houselights were brought down to about twenty percent and a single spot followed me from a perch at the back of the room. The light was warm — what I later learned is called bastard amber, a pinkish golden gel that Dan Harlan describes in his theater lecture as the ideal follow-spot color because it flatters every skin tone and makes the performer look vibrant and inviting.
The effect on the audience was immediate and profound.
Within the first thirty seconds, I knew something was different. The audience was more focused. More present. Their attention felt concentrated in a way I had never experienced in a fully lit room. When I made eye contact with someone in the first few rows — the rows I could still see — their engagement was sharper. They were watching me the way you watch a movie, not the way you watch a meeting presenter.
And the reactions were bigger. Not just a little bigger. Significantly bigger. The first laugh came earlier and louder than I expected. The first gasp during a mentalism piece was audible from the back of the room. The applause after the opening piece had a weight to it that I had not earned through anything different in my delivery. The lighting had changed the equation.
Scott Alexander makes this point with characteristic directness. He describes bright houselights as a force that startles the audience and sucks the energy from the room, while a follow spot creates the ideal performance dynamic: performer in light, audience in comfortable darkness.
What I experienced in Klagenfurt was exactly that dynamic. The follow spot did not just illuminate me. It created a boundary. A visual container. The lit circle was the show. Everything outside it was the audience’s space — private, dark, personal. That boundary gave the audience permission to react freely because they were not part of the visual spectacle. They were watching it.
Why the Follow Spot Works
The follow spot creates a psychological dynamic that full houselights cannot replicate. Here is what it does.
First, it directs attention. When the whole room is lit, the audience’s eyes have multiple competing focal points. The performer, yes, but also the decorations, the other tables, the servers, the exit signs, the person three tables over who just checked their phone. A follow spot creates a single focal point. The lit area is the performer. Everything else recedes into peripheral darkness. The audience’s attention is guided by the light itself, and this guidance is effortless. They do not have to choose to pay attention. The light makes the choice for them.
Second, it creates depth and dimension. Harlan goes into detail about this in his theater lecture — how lighting from the front, at the right angle and with the right gel, creates a three-dimensional, warm, living quality that flat overhead lighting destroys. A performer under a follow spot looks like a character in a film. A performer under fluorescent panels looks like someone giving a PowerPoint presentation. The visual quality of the light shapes the audience’s perception of what they are watching, and follow-spot light says “this is a performance” in a way that overhead fluorescents never can.
Third, and most importantly for pacing and energy, it gives the audience anonymity. As I discussed in yesterday’s post, people react more freely when they feel unobserved. A follow spot, by keeping the audience in relative darkness, provides that feeling. The audience member can laugh without their tablemates seeing their face contort. They can gasp without worrying about looking foolish. They can be fully, genuinely surprised without the self-conscious modulation that comes from being visible.
When Houselights Are the Right Choice
I do not want to suggest that follow spots are always better and houselights are always wrong. That would be an oversimplification that ignores the realities of different performance contexts.
There are situations where houselights are appropriate and even preferable.
Interactive keynote presentations, where the audience needs to feel connected to each other rather than isolated in darkness. Close-up and walk-around settings at cocktail receptions, where the audience is fragmented and there is no single focal point. Daytime outdoor events, obviously. And very small rooms of fifteen or twenty people, where the intimacy of a small group is itself a kind of darkness.
But for a dedicated show — a thirty-minute set for forty or more people in a room with proper theatrical capability — the follow spot is, I have come to believe, not optional. It is as essential to the show as the microphone or the music.
Convincing the Venue
The practical challenge, of course, is that most corporate venues do not offer a follow spot as a default. They have houselights. They have maybe some stage wash. They have whatever the AV company installed for the conference. Getting a follow spot requires a conversation, and that conversation requires the performer to articulate why it matters.
I had a version of this conversation at a corporate event in Vienna that crystallized how to handle it. The event planner was resistant to changing the lighting. “We usually just leave the lights on,” she said, echoing what I have heard dozens of times. “People need to see their tables for the wine and the coffee.”
My response, which I have refined over several events, goes something like this: “Absolutely. The table service should continue without interruption. What I am asking for is a reduction in the overhead lights to about thirty or forty percent — enough for people to see their tables and their glasses — combined with a front light on the stage area. The audience will still be able to see everything they need. But the slight dimming creates a theatrical feel that significantly improves how they experience the entertainment. It is the difference between watching a show and being in a meeting room where a show happens to be occurring.”
That last line usually lands. Event planners understand the difference between a show and a meeting, and they want their event to feel like the former. The lighting request, framed as a shift in atmosphere rather than a technical demand, becomes something they want to provide rather than something they are being asked to accommodate.
In Vienna, the event planner agreed. The tech brought the houselights down to about forty percent and aimed two front-of-house spotlights at the stage area. It was not a proper follow spot — the lights did not move with me — but it created a similar dynamic: bright stage, dimmer audience, a visual boundary between performer and observer.
The result was one of the strongest corporate shows I had done at that point. The audience was responsive, vocal, and genuinely engaged in a way that the event planner commented on afterward. “Whatever you did, they loved it,” she said. What I did was perform the same set I always perform. What the lighting did was give the audience permission to show how much they loved it.
The Technical Basics
For performers who are new to thinking about lighting, here are the practical elements I have learned to pay attention to.
Light direction matters. Light from the front — slightly above eye level, aimed down at about a thirty-degree angle — flatters the performer and creates depth. Light from directly above flattens the face and creates shadows under the eyes and nose. Light from behind turns the performer into a silhouette. For most magic performance, front light is what you want.
Color temperature matters. Harlan’s recommendation of bastard amber as a follow-spot gel is based on decades of theatrical wisdom. It is a warm, slightly pinkish tone that makes skin look healthy and vibrant under any lighting condition. Cold white light — the default for most conference rooms — makes everyone look slightly ill. If you have any say in the color of the light hitting you, warm is better than cool.
The LED revolution has made all of this more accessible. Modern LED stage lights can be dialed to any color temperature, adjusted for intensity from a single fixture, and run cool enough to be positioned close to the performer without generating heat. Harlan notes that LEDs have transformed what solo performers can do with lighting because they eliminate the need for gel changes, multiple fixtures, and the heat management issues that traditional stage lighting created.
Spot size matters. If the lit area is too tight, you feel confined and every small movement takes you out of the light. If it is too wide, it illuminates the audience around you and defeats the purpose. The ideal spot, in my experience, covers you from your feet to a full arm spread on either side, with a few feet of room to step in any direction. A soft edge — where the light gradually fades rather than cutting sharply — is more forgiving and more flattering than a hard edge.
The Energy Equation
The follow spot versus houselights decision is ultimately about energy management. Every performer is working with a finite pool of audience energy. The material generates energy. The personality generates energy. The magic generates energy. But the environment also affects how much of that energy the audience expresses.
Full houselights act as a filter on audience energy. The energy is there — the audience feels the laughter, the surprise, the wonder — but the visibility of the room suppresses how much of it they express. A laugh becomes a smile. A gasp becomes a raised eyebrow. Enthusiastic applause becomes polite clapping. The filter does not eliminate reactions. It reduces their amplitude.
A follow spot removes the filter. The darkness gives the audience permission to express more of what they feel. And the cumulative effect across a thirty-minute show is the difference between a good show and a great one — not because the performer does anything differently, but because the audience’s visible, audible energy feeds back into the performer, who responds with more energy, which generates more reactions, which feeds back again.
The lighting decision is not about you. It is about what you are giving the audience permission to do. And in the dark, with a single warm spot on the stage, you are giving them permission to be the audience they want to be — free, reactive, fully engaged, and invisible enough to let go.
That permission is worth every conversation with every event planner, every request to dim the houselights, every moment spent thinking about something as seemingly mundane as the direction and color of light. Because the light is not separate from the show. The light is part of the show. And getting it right changes everything that happens underneath it.