I want to tell you about a problem that plagued me for three months, that I could not identify despite watching video of my performances, that no audience member ever mentioned, and that turned out to be caused by something so small it seems absurd to write an entire post about it.
Which hand was holding a prop.
That is it. That is the whole problem. A prop was in my right hand when it should have been in my left hand, and this single detail was quietly undermining an entire routine.
Let me explain how I discovered this, because the discovery taught me more about action scripting than anything else in my development as a performer.
The Routine That Felt Wrong
I had a stage routine that I performed at corporate keynotes. It was a strong piece. Good reactions. Solid structure. Tested and refined over dozens of performances. On paper, it was working.
But it never felt right. There was something off about it — a vague discomfort that I could not pin down. After every performance, I would have the same nagging sense that something was not quite clicking. The routine was effective, but it was not effortless. There was friction in it, a subtle resistance that I could feel but not diagnose.
I watched videos. I asked friends for feedback. I analyzed the dialogue. I timed the pacing. Everything checked out. The words were good. The timing was good. The audience reactions were good. But the feeling of friction persisted.
Then I started writing the detailed action script I described in my last post. And on the second page of action descriptions, I found it.
The routine began with a prop in my right hand. This was not a conscious decision — it was a habit. I picked it up with my right hand because I am right-handed, and picking things up with your dominant hand is what humans do without thinking. It felt natural. It felt obvious. It felt like the only way to do it.
But here is what that right-hand default created.
The Cascade
When you hold a prop in your right hand, your left hand is free. Your left hand becomes your gesture hand, your pointing hand, your communication hand. For a right-handed person, this feels slightly unnatural because your dominant hand is occupied and your non-dominant hand is doing the expressive work. But you adapt. You do not think about it much.
What you might not think about at all is what happens to your body. When you hold a significant prop in your right hand and gesture with your left, you tend to open your body to the left side of the room. Your left hand reaches out, your shoulders follow, and your body rotates slightly in that direction. The right side of the room — the side your prop hand is on — sees more of your shoulder than your face.
This is the first domino. A prop in the right hand leads to left-side body orientation.
The second domino: when I needed to interact with a volunteer, the volunteer stood to my right. This is standard staging — in a typical Austrian venue, when you bring someone on stage, they come from the audience’s left, which is the performer’s right. So my volunteer was on my right, my prop was in my right hand, and my body was oriented to the left.
To engage with the volunteer, I had to turn my body to the right. But the prop in my right hand was between us, creating a closed-off visual. My arm was bent, the prop was at chest height, and from the audience’s perspective, I looked like I was shielding something rather than sharing a moment.
Third domino: at one point in the routine, I needed my right hand free. The prop had to go somewhere. Since it was in my right hand, I transferred it to my left hand. This transfer was visible to the audience and it accomplished nothing from their perspective. It was housekeeping — a moment of physical administration in the middle of what should have been a flowing performance.
Fourth domino: with the prop now in my left hand and the volunteer to my right, my body finally oriented correctly. But I had the prop on the wrong side — it was on the audience-left side of my body, visually disconnected from the volunteer who was part of the routine. The spatial relationship between performer, prop, and volunteer was scattered rather than composed.
All of this from picking up a prop with the wrong hand.
The Fix
I restarted the routine with the prop in my left hand. That was the entire fix. One change. Left hand instead of right.
With the prop in my left hand, my right hand was free for gestures. Since my right hand is my dominant hand, the gestures were more natural, more expansive, more confident. My body naturally opened to the right side of the room — toward the volunteer. The prop was on the same side as the volunteer, creating a clean visual triangle between me, the prop, and the person I was interacting with.
When I needed my right hand for the next phase of the routine, it was already free. No transfer necessary. The prop stayed in my left hand, the right hand did its work, and the audience saw a performer whose body was composed and purposeful rather than busy and rearranging.
The friction disappeared. Not gradually — immediately. The first rehearsal with the prop in the left hand felt different. Easier. More natural, paradoxically, even though I was using my non-dominant hand for the hold. The routine flowed in a way it never had before, and the reason was that the physical choreography finally matched the spatial logic of the staging.
Why This Is Not Trivial
I can hear the objection: you are writing a thousand words about which hand holds a prop. This is overthinking.
I used to make that objection myself. I do not make it anymore.
The audience does not consciously notice which hand holds a prop. They do not think about body angles or visual triangles. But they register these things as feelings. The audience feels that a performance is smooth or awkward, confident or uncertain. And those feelings are the product of hundreds of small physical details working together.
When every detail is right, the audience feels something they cannot articulate but absolutely experience: “this person knows what they are doing.” When details are wrong, they feel the opposite — the same way you sense a picture frame is slightly crooked even though you could not measure the angle.
Ken Weber talks about this kind of detail throughout his approach to scripting and action planning. The specificity he demands is not obsessive. It is the minimum level of detail required to produce a performance that feels effortless.
The Visual Composition Principle
What I learned from the wrong-hand problem is that performance is visual composition. You are not just a person standing on a stage doing things. You are a visual image that the audience is reading, consciously and unconsciously, every second.
This image includes your body position, your hand positions, the locations of your props, the spatial relationships between you and any volunteers, and the overall balance of the stage picture. Every physical decision you make affects this image. And the image is what the audience processes first — before your words, before the effect, before the magic.
Think about it from the audience’s perspective. They see you before they hear you. They are reading your body language, your posture, your spatial relationship to the stage environment, long before the first word of your script registers. If the visual image is composed and intentional, the audience begins in a state of trust. If the visual image is scattered or awkward, the audience begins in a state of mild discomfort, and you spend the first minute of your performance overcoming that deficit.
I started thinking about each moment of my routines as a photograph. If someone took a snapshot at any given instant, what would it show? Would the composition be clean? Would the eye know where to look? Would the spatial relationships make sense?
When I found moments where the snapshot would look messy — performer turned away from part of the audience, prop and volunteer on opposite sides of the frame, hands busy with logistics rather than communication — I revised the action script to fix them. Sometimes the fix was as simple as switching hands. Sometimes it meant repositioning the volunteer. Sometimes it meant rethinking the entire staging of a phase.
Three Questions for Every Prop
I now ask three questions about every prop in every routine, before I start writing the action script.
First: which hand should hold this at the start? Not which hand naturally grabs it. Which hand should hold it, given the staging, the volunteer position, and the visual composition I want to create.
Second: where does this prop need to end up? What is its final position, and what path does it take to get there? Does it transfer between hands? If so, when, and can that transfer be eliminated?
Third: what does the audience see when I am holding this? Does the prop obscure my face, my gestures, my connection with the audience? Does it create a visual barrier between me and the volunteer? Does holding it in this hand force my body into an angle that excludes part of the room?
These questions take less than a minute to answer for each prop. But the answers shape the entire physical choreography of the routine. Getting them right at the beginning prevents the kind of cascade failure I experienced — the series of downstream problems that all traced back to a single unconsidered default.
The Hotel Room Test
Here is a practical exercise that requires nothing more than a hotel room and a phone.
Set up your props. Position yourself as you would on stage. Perform the routine — just the physical actions, no dialogue — while filming yourself from the front. Watch the video for one thing only: the visual composition. Is the picture clean at each moment? Can you see the performer’s face? Are the spatial relationships clear?
Then swap the prop to the other hand and do it again. Compare the two videos. One version will look noticeably more composed, and the reason is always the same: the physical choreography is determined by which hand initiates the routine.
I have done this with every routine in my repertoire. In three cases, I discovered I had been starting with the prop in the wrong hand. In two of those, switching hands eliminated an unnecessary mid-routine transfer. Small changes. Invisible causes. Visible effects.
The Bigger Lesson
The egg bag question is not really about egg bags or hands or any specific prop. It is about a principle that applies to every physical aspect of performance: details that seem trivial are often structural.
The hand that holds the prop is the foundation of a physical architecture that determines body position, audience engagement, spatial relationships, and the performer’s freedom to gesture and connect. Changing one detail changes everything downstream.
This is why action scripting at a high level of detail is not obsessive. It is structural engineering. A prop in the wrong hand is a weak joint. A body at the wrong angle is a weak joint. Any one might hold. Together, they create cumulative weakness the audience feels even if they cannot name it.
Get the small things right, and the big things take care of themselves. I learned that from a prop that kept ending up in the wrong hand, at a desk in Graz, writing down every physical movement of a five-minute routine in painstaking detail.
The detail is where the craft lives. And the craft is what makes the magic look like magic.