I was twenty minutes into a corporate keynote in Graz when I noticed something that should have been obvious but somehow was not.
The audience was watching me. They were quiet. They were facing forward. Their phones were mostly on the table. By every surface-level metric, they were paying attention. I was hitting my marks, landing the lines, executing the effects cleanly. The mentalism segment had gone without a hitch. The card work was smooth. I was doing everything I had practiced in hotel rooms across Austria for months.
And yet there was something missing, something I could feel in the room like a change in air pressure. It was not hostility. It was not boredom, exactly. It was more like a polite vacancy. The audience was there physically, but they had not been moved. They had not gasped, had not laughed spontaneously, had not leaned forward with wide eyes. They were observing a demonstration of skill with the same passive interest they might bring to watching someone assemble furniture efficiently.
I finished the show. People clapped. A few came up afterward. The event organizer said it went well. I drove back to my hotel and sat in the room for a long time, trying to figure out what had gone wrong when nothing had technically gone wrong at all.
That night was the beginning of a question that would reshape how I think about performance entirely: what, exactly, is the point of standing in front of people?
Welcome to Section 6: The Reactions Game
This is the start of something new in this blog. Everything I have written so far — about practice, about the six pillars, about show structure, about the director’s eye, about choosing material — has been building toward this. Because all of those elements serve a single purpose, and for a long time, I did not truly understand what that purpose was.
I thought the purpose was to perform well. To execute cleanly. To demonstrate skill. To show people something they had never seen before. To be impressive.
I was wrong about all of it.
The purpose of standing in front of an audience — the only purpose, the purpose that subsumes everything else — is to get a reaction. Not to show something. To make them feel something. To create a response in their bodies and minds that they did not choose and cannot suppress. A gasp. A laugh. A moment where they forget to breathe. A turning to the person next to them with eyes that say “did you see that?”
That is it. That is the whole game. Everything else is just the mechanism for getting there.
The Realization That Changed Everything
Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment put this idea in front of me with a directness that left no room for evasion. Weber’s argument is simple and, once you hear it, impossible to unhear: every moment you spend on stage should be targeting a specific reaction from the audience. If a moment is not targeting a reaction, it is filler. And filler is the enemy of entertainment.
I read that and felt a cold recognition settle over me. Because I realized that a significant portion of what I had been doing on stage was not targeting any reaction at all. It was just… happening. Words I was saying because they came next in the sequence. Actions I was performing because they were part of the routine. Movements I was making because I had rehearsed them. None of it was bad. All of it was competent. But competent is not the same as compelling, and the gap between those two things is exactly the gap I had been feeling in that room in Graz.
The audience had not reacted because I had not given them anything to react to. I had given them things to observe. Things to watch. Things to follow along with. But observation is passive. Reaction is active. And I had been optimizing for observation while ignoring reaction entirely.
The Demonstrator’s Trap
Here is what I think happens to a lot of performers, especially those of us who came to magic as adults with analytical minds. We learn the material. We practice the techniques. We develop the skills. And then we stand in front of people and demonstrate those skills, because that is what we have been preparing to do. We have been preparing to execute, and execute we do.
But execution is not performance. Execution is what happens in the practice room. Performance is what happens when execution meets an audience and creates a reaction. Without the reaction, you are just executing in public. You are practicing with witnesses.
I fell into this trap hard. My consulting background trained me to deliver information clearly and competently. When I started incorporating magic into keynotes, I brought that same framework. Here is the setup. Here is the demonstration. Here is the reveal. Clear, logical, well-structured. And utterly devoid of the kind of emotional punch that makes people remember your name three days later.
The problem was not the material. The problem was that I was treating the material as the product when the material was actually just the delivery system. The product is the reaction. The card trick is not what I am selling. The gasp when the card appears in an impossible location — that is what I am selling. The mentalism routine is not the product. The moment when someone’s jaw drops because I apparently read their mind — that is the product.
What Reactions Actually Look Like
One of the things that helped me understand this distinction was going back and watching recordings of my performances, but this time watching only the audience. Not myself. I covered my own image with a sticky note and just watched the faces in the crowd.
What I saw was instructive. During the moments I had considered the strongest parts of my show — the technically demanding sequences, the clever constructions, the material I was most proud of — the audience was often merely attentive. Watching. Following. Present but not activated.
But during other moments — moments I had considered transitions or setups or even throwaway lines — faces would change. Someone would lean forward. Someone would turn to their neighbor. Someone would cover their mouth. These were the reactions, and they were not always happening where I expected them to happen.
This forced me to reconsider what “strong” meant. I had been evaluating my material based on technical difficulty and cleverness of construction. But the audience was not evaluating it that way at all. They were responding to emotional triggers, to moments of surprise, to points where something landed in their gut rather than their head. The technical masterpiece that I had spent weeks perfecting might get a polite nod. The simple, direct, emotionally clear moment might get a genuine gasp.
The Shift in How I Prepare
Once I understood that reactions are the product, my entire preparation process changed. I stopped asking “is this well-executed?” and started asking “what reaction am I going for here?” I stopped evaluating my show based on how smoothly it flowed and started evaluating it based on how many genuine reactions it produced per minute.
This sounds like a small change. It is not. It is the difference between a chef who focuses on technique and a chef who focuses on whether diners close their eyes and make involuntary sounds when they take the first bite. The technique matters only insofar as it serves the reaction. Perfect technique that produces no reaction is wasted effort. Imperfect technique that produces a genuine gasp is doing its job.
I started mapping my act moment by moment, asking for each segment: what is the audience supposed to feel right now? Not think. Feel. Are they supposed to be intrigued? Amused? Stunned? If I could not answer that question for a given moment, then that moment had no purpose. It was filler. It was me standing in front of people without giving them a reason to care.
The Hotel Room Test
I developed a practice that I still use. Late at night in whatever hotel room I happen to be staying in, I will run through my material — not the moves, not the technique, but the script, the words, the structure — and at each point I stop and ask myself: if I were sitting in the audience right now, what would I be feeling?
Not what would I be thinking. What would I be feeling.
If the answer is “nothing in particular” or “mild interest” or “waiting for the next thing to happen,” then I have found a dead spot. A moment where the audience is not reacting, just enduring. And enduring is the opposite of entertainment.
This is brutal work. It requires honesty that is painful to muster, because the dead spots are often the parts you like the most. The clever construction you spent a week refining. The elegant transition you are proud of. The bit of business that felt so natural you assumed it was working. But if it is not producing a reaction, it is not working. It is just pleasant to perform.
Why This Section Exists
The posts that follow in this section are about what I consider the most important framework I have encountered in my study of performance: the idea that there are exactly three types of reactions worth pursuing, and that every moment of your act should be targeting one of them. We will get into what those three reactions are, how to design for them, how to identify when you are missing them, and what happens when technically skilled performers ignore them entirely.
But the foundation for all of that is this single idea: the purpose of performance is reaction. Not demonstration. Not display. Not exhibition of skill. Reaction. The audience’s experience is the product, and the audience’s experience is measured in reactions.
I wish someone had told me this before that night in Graz. I wish someone had said: stop worrying about whether you are performing well and start worrying about whether anyone in that room is feeling anything. Because a room full of people who are watching you without feeling anything is not an audience. It is a waiting room.
The reactions game is the whole game. Everything else is just preparation for playing it.