The video was devastating.
I was reviewing footage from a corporate event in Linz — a keynote for about a hundred and twenty people at an insurance company’s annual conference. I had performed a mentalism piece that I knew had hit hard. The spectator’s reaction in the moment had been enormous. She had gasped, covered her mouth, staggered back a step. I could hear the audience responding. It felt like one of the best moments I had produced all year.
Then I watched the footage from the back of the room.
From the audience’s perspective, the spectator had been facing me. Which meant her back was to the audience. They could see my face clearly. They could see my reaction to her reaction. But her face — the most expressive, most emotionally powerful element in the entire moment — was invisible to seventy percent of the room.
All those people had heard her gasp. They had seen her shoulders move. They could tell something was happening. But they could not see the expression on her face. They could not see the exact moment when the impossibility registered. They could not see her eyes go wide or her jaw drop or the involuntary head shake that said “this cannot be real.”
They had heard the thunder but missed the lightning. And it was entirely my fault.
The Positioning Problem
This is a mistake I made repeatedly in my early performances, and it comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what the audience is watching. When I first started performing at corporate events and as part of my keynotes, I thought the audience was watching me. I thought I was the focal point. I positioned myself center stage, facing the audience, and placed the spectator wherever it was convenient for the effect — usually facing me, which meant facing away from the audience.
From my perspective, the interaction was perfect. I could see the spectator’s face. I could read their emotions. I could adjust my performance based on their reactions. The problem was that I was the only person in the room who could see all of this. Everyone else was watching the back of someone’s head.
Darwin Ortiz writes about this principle in the context of attention control. He describes how audiences naturally follow the performer’s gaze and body orientation, and how the structure of a performance should ensure that the center of interest and the source of information are always the same thing. But when a spectator is having a powerful emotional reaction, the center of interest shifts. The audience does not want to watch me anymore. They want to watch the spectator. And if the spectator is positioned so that the audience cannot see their face, the most powerful moment in the performance is happening in a blind spot.
The Director’s Mindset
The solution required a shift in thinking that I did not make naturally. I had to stop thinking like a performer and start thinking like a director.
A performer thinks about the interaction between themselves and the spectator. A director thinks about the interaction between the stage picture and the audience. A performer is inside the scene. A director is outside the scene, watching from the audience’s perspective, asking: what does the audience see right now? Where are their eyes? What information are they receiving?
When I started thinking like a director, spectator positioning became one of the most important decisions in every piece I perform. Not because it affects the method or the execution — it usually does not. But because it determines whether the audience gets to witness the reaction or merely hear about it.
Here is the principle I now follow: the spectator’s face should be visible to the majority of the audience at the moment of maximum reaction. Everything else — my position, the prop placement, the staging geometry — is negotiable. The spectator’s face is not.
The Geometry of Reactions
There are really only a few basic positioning options when you are on stage with a spectator, and each one has dramatically different implications for what the audience sees.
The first is the face-to-face position, where you and the spectator are facing each other directly. This is the most natural position for conversation and interaction, and it is also the worst position for audience visibility. One of you is facing the audience and the other has their back to them. In my early performances, the spectator always had their back to the audience because I was the one who needed to be seen. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that, at the moment of the climax, the spectator was the one who needed to be seen.
The second is the cheated position, borrowed from theater and film terminology. In this arrangement, both you and the spectator are angled toward the audience, with your bodies roughly forty-five degrees open. You can still interact naturally — make eye contact, speak to each other, share a moment — but both faces are at least partially visible to the audience. This is the position I use most often now. It requires a conscious effort because it does not feel natural. Your instinct is to face the person you are talking to directly. But the cheated angle preserves the conversational dynamic while giving the audience visual access to the reaction.
The third is what I call the reveal position, which I use specifically for the moment of maximum impact. In this arrangement, the spectator is facing the audience almost directly, and I am behind them or to the side. This is the position that maximizes audience visibility of the spectator’s reaction, and it is the position I move into — subtly, naturally, as part of the flow of the effect — just before the climax.
The transition from cheated position to reveal position is something I rehearse carefully. It needs to feel organic, like a natural movement in the flow of the interaction, not like a stage direction. If the spectator feels like they are being positioned, the artificiality breaks the moment. If it happens naturally — I step to the side to give them space to look at something, or I move behind them to point at something in their hands — they do not even notice that their face is now visible to the entire room.
The Three-Step System I Use
After the Linz incident, I developed a simple three-step system for spectator positioning that I now use for every piece that involves an audience member on stage.
Step one: establish the interaction in the cheated position. When the spectator first comes up, I position both of us at roughly forty-five degrees to the audience. This feels natural enough that the spectator does not resist it, and it gives the audience a decent view of both faces during the setup and interaction phase.
Step two: migrate to the reveal position before the climax. In the thirty seconds or so before the impossible moment, I gradually shift my position so that the spectator is more open to the audience. I might take a half step to the side. I might hand them something and step back so they have to hold it up where the audience can see. I might move to their other side, which naturally rotates them. Each of these movements serves a legitimate purpose in the context of the effect, so they do not feel like direction.
Step three: get out of the frame at the moment of impact. When the climax hits, I want the audience looking at the spectator, not at me. So I make sure I am not blocking their view and not competing for their attention. I might be slightly behind the spectator, or to the far side, or simply still. The spectator’s reaction is the show now, and my job is to not get in the way of it.
The Close-Up Challenge
Positioning is even harder in close-up settings. At corporate networking events, working at tables or in small groups, people are arranged in circles and clusters. The “audience” might be spread across three hundred and sixty degrees.
In these situations, I identify where the majority of the spectators are before I begin. If eight people are gathered in a rough semicircle, I position the primary spectator so their face is visible to the arc, not buried in one corner. This sometimes means making unexpected choices about who to select. All else being equal, I choose the person whose current position gives the best audience visibility.
Scott Alexander writes about the importance of treating audience participation as the heart of the show and managing it carefully. I would add that where you position the audience member reveals whether you understand that the spectator’s experience is the real performance, or whether you still think the performance is about you.
The Rehearsal Challenge
The hardest part of this system is that you cannot fully rehearse it alone. In my hotel room practice sessions, I can rehearse the effect, the patter, the timing, the technical execution. But I cannot rehearse spectator positioning because there is no spectator.
What I can do is rehearse the movement patterns. I practice the physical choreography of shifting from the cheated position to the reveal position. I practice the half-step to the side, the gesture that naturally rotates the spectator, the moment where I step back and out of the frame. These movements become muscle memory, so that in performance I execute them automatically without having to think about staging while simultaneously managing the effect.
I also practice with the hotel room chair as a stand-in spectator. I place a chair where the spectator would be, perform the effect, and at the climax, I check: if someone were sitting in that chair, would their face be visible to where the audience would be? If not, I adjust my movement pattern and run it again.
It is an imperfect system. Every venue is different, every audience configuration is different, every spectator stands at a slightly different angle. But having the movement patterns in muscle memory means I can adapt in real time without losing focus on the performance itself. I know the general choreography. The specific adjustments happen instinctively.
The Linz Lesson
I went back to Linz about six months after the insurance conference. Different company, different event, similar venue. This time, I was prepared. I positioned the spectator using the three-step system. At the climax, she was facing the audience. Her face was fully visible to the room.
The reaction was similar in intensity to the first time — the gasping, the hands coming up, the head shaking. But this time, the room experienced it. They saw every microexpression. They saw the exact moment the impossibility registered. They saw the transition from confusion to shock to something that looked very much like joy.
The difference in the room’s response was staggering. The first time, in the original Linz performance, the audience had reacted to the sound of the spectator’s shock. This time, they reacted to the sight of it. And sight is so much more powerful than sound. The visual experience of watching another person’s face during a moment of genuine astonishment is orders of magnitude more impactful than hearing their gasp from across a room.
All because of where the spectator was standing.
Not a new effect. Not a better method. Not more practice or more rehearsal or more technical skill. Just a different position. A few degrees of rotation. A half step to the side.
It was the simplest change I had ever made to my performance, and it was one of the most impactful. Because the reaction was always there. I just had to make sure the audience could see it.