I want you to think about the last time you watched a performer — any performer, in any discipline — and felt the show sag. Not during a trick. Not during a joke. Not during any of the featured material. During the space between the material. That dead air where one thing has ended and the next thing has not yet begun.
That space is where shows go to die.
I know this because I have stood in that space, sweating through my shirt, watching the energy drain out of a room while I fumbled for my next prop and said something brilliant like “Okay, so… for this next one, I’m going to need, uh…”
That was a corporate event in Klagenfurt, maybe eighteen months into performing. I had put together a thirty-minute set with four strong pieces. Each piece was rehearsed. Each piece worked. When I rehearsed them individually in my hotel room, they were solid. But when I put them back to back in front of an audience, something fell apart. Not the pieces. The spaces between the pieces.
After each effect, there was this awkward gap where I was essentially resetting — mentally, physically, sometimes literally putting one thing down and picking another up. And in those gaps, the audience disconnected. They would start talking to each other. They would check their phones. They would shift in their seats. By the time I launched into the next piece, I had to win their attention back from scratch, which meant the opening of each routine was fighting an uphill battle.
I had built four beautiful bricks. But I had no cement between them.
The Cement Metaphor
Pete McCabe, in Scripting Magic, makes a point that reoriented how I think about show construction. He argues that you should always script from the audience’s perspective — not from your perspective as the performer, and not from the trick’s perspective as a sequence of actions, but from the audience’s perspective as a continuous experience. What does this show feel like to someone sitting in the third row?
From the audience’s perspective, there are no separate tricks. There is just the show. A continuous flow of experience. They do not think in segments the way you do. They do not know where one routine ends and another begins — unless you make it obvious by grinding to a halt between them. When you stop, reset, and restart, you are telling the audience: “That was one thing. This is a different thing.” And every time you do that, you break the flow and force them to re-engage.
Scott Alexander puts it differently. He talks about callbacks and running gags as connective tissue — elements that weave through the entire show and tie everything together. He calls it finding your “Fig Newton,” a recurring element that creates an inside joke between you and the audience and makes the show feel like one cohesive experience rather than a series of unrelated bits.
Both of them are saying the same thing from different angles. The spaces between tricks are not dead zones. They are opportunities. And if you script them with the same care you script the tricks themselves, they become some of the strongest moments in your show.
The Three Types of Transitions I Use
After bombing enough transitions to learn from the pain, I developed three types of scripted transitions that I rotate through my sets. None of them are original. All of them are stolen from performers far more experienced than I am. But they work, and they work because they give the audience something to hold onto during the moment when the last trick has ended and the next one has not yet begun.
1. The Callback
A callback is when you reference something from earlier in the show. It can be a line, a joke, a moment, a prop, a volunteer, or anything else the audience remembers. The effect is immediate: it creates a sense of continuity. It tells the audience that what they saw before and what they are about to see are part of the same story. And it rewards them for paying attention, which makes them pay more attention going forward.
Here is how I use callbacks in transitions. Say my first piece involves a volunteer who makes a particular choice — let’s say they select a word from a book. After the piece ends and I am transitioning to the next one, I might say something like: “Before we continue, I want to come back to something. Remember the word Sarah chose? I want you to keep that in the back of your mind. It’s going to matter later.”
Now the audience is doing two things. They are engaged with whatever I do next, and they are holding onto Sarah’s word, wondering when it will come back. I have created a thread that connects the first piece to a future piece, and that thread carries the audience’s attention across the transition like a bridge.
The word might actually come back later. Or it might not, and I let it fade naturally. Either way, it served its purpose: it filled the dead space with curiosity.
2. The Thematic Bridge
A thematic bridge connects two pieces through a shared idea rather than a shared element. Instead of calling back to a specific moment, you articulate a theme that links what just happened to what is about to happen.
For example, if I have just finished a piece about how unpredictable choices can be, and I am about to move into a piece about the power of influence, the transition might sound like: “Here’s what fascinates me about what just happened. Everyone in this room would say that was a free choice. Completely random. Unpredictable. But what if it wasn’t? What if the feeling of freedom is itself something that can be shaped?”
That transition does several things simultaneously. It frames the previous effect in a new light, which adds value to what the audience already saw. It sets up the premise for the next effect, which builds anticipation. And it gives the audience an intellectual thread to follow — an idea that connects the two pieces into a larger argument about how the mind works.
Thematic bridges work particularly well in mentalism, where you are already dealing in ideas and psychology. But they work in any context where you can find a conceptual link between two pieces. The link does not have to be profound. It just has to be present. Something for the audience’s mind to hold onto while you reset.
3. The Audience Check-In
This is the simplest transition, and sometimes the most effective. You just talk to the audience. Not about the tricks. About them.
“How are we doing? Everyone still with me? Good. Because what I’m about to show you is something I’ve been working on for a while and I’ve been looking forward to this moment all evening.”
Or: “I need to ask you something. And I want an honest answer. How many of you walked in tonight thinking this would be a normal corporate event? Show of hands. Yeah. I thought so. Okay, buckle up.”
The check-in works because it acknowledges the audience as participants rather than spectators. It breaks the fourth wall just enough to create a moment of genuine connection. And it fills the transition with warmth and personality rather than dead air and fumbling.
I use check-ins most often when I need a longer transition — when I have a prop to set up or a table to arrange or something that requires a few extra seconds. The check-in buys me that time while keeping the audience engaged, and it has the added benefit of letting me read the room. If the audience responds energetically, I know I can push the next piece harder. If they respond with polite smiles, I know I need to recalibrate.
The “For My Next Trick” Problem
All three of these transition types share a common feature: none of them announce that you are transitioning. None of them say “for my next trick” or “moving on” or “now I’d like to show you something else.” These phrases are the enemy of continuity. They are the performer’s equivalent of a chapter break in a novel — a signal that one thing has ended and something unrelated is starting.
The moment you say “for my next trick,” you reset the audience’s engagement to zero. They have to decide all over again whether to pay attention. They have been given permission to check out, stretch, whisper to their neighbor, look at their phone. You have essentially told them: the thing you were invested in is over; here is a new thing that you have no investment in yet.
A good transition never signals a break. It flows. One piece bleeds into the next through a callback, a theme, a conversation, or a story. The audience should not be able to point to the exact moment where one effect ended and the next began. They should feel like they have been on a continuous journey, not watching a series of disconnected demonstrations.
Scripting the Invisible
Here is the thing about transitions that I did not understand for a long time: they need to be scripted with the same rigor as the tricks themselves. Maybe more.
The tricks have built-in structure. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They have dramatic beats and climaxes and reveals. The structure carries you. But transitions have no built-in structure. They are formless. And formless things, if you do not shape them deliberately, become shapeless — which is another word for boring.
I now write my transitions into my script in full. Not just a note that says “transition to next piece.” The actual words. The callback reference. The thematic bridge. The check-in question. Every word, scripted and rehearsed.
I also script the physical transitions — where the old prop goes, where the new prop comes from, what my hands are doing while I am talking. Because a verbal transition loses its power if you are simultaneously breaking eye contact to rummage in your case for the next thing you need. The physical and verbal transitions have to happen in concert. The words fill the time while the hands reset the stage.
The cement between the bricks is not glamorous. It is not the part anyone remembers. Nobody walks out of a show saying, “That transition between the second and third piece was incredible.” But they do walk out saying, “That show flowed beautifully.” And what they are really saying, without knowing the technical vocabulary, is that the transitions worked.
A Practical Exercise
If you perform a set of any length, try this. Write out your set list. Then, for each gap between effects, write a transition script. Not a note. A script. The actual words you will say.
For each transition, choose one of the three types: callback, thematic bridge, or check-in. Do not use the same type twice in a row. Alternate. The variety keeps the transitions themselves from becoming predictable.
Then rehearse the transitions. Not the tricks. Just the transitions. Stand in your practice space, finish the last line of one trick, and immediately deliver the transition. Time it. Refine it. Cut it down. Make it earn its place.
If a transition is longer than thirty seconds, it is probably too long. If it is shorter than ten seconds, you are probably leaving dead air somewhere. Find the sweet spot where the audience’s attention carries smoothly from one piece to the next without sagging.
The bricks are important. I am not pretending otherwise. But bricks without cement are just a pile of bricks. The cement is what makes them a wall. The cement is what makes a set into a show.
And the cement, like everything else in this craft, needs to be written before it can be spoken, and rehearsed before it can be believed.