The mistake was so obvious that I cannot believe it took me over a year to see it.
I was performing a mentalism piece at a corporate event in Salzburg. The format was a seated dinner, about eighty people, and I had pulled a woman from one of the front tables to participate. She sat in a chair on the small stage area, and I stood next to her while we worked through the piece together. The interaction was strong. The rapport was genuine. And when the impossible moment landed, her reaction was — quiet.
She sat very still. Her eyes went wide. She said “oh my god” in a voice that only I could hear. She shook her head slowly. It was a genuine reaction, I could see that. She was truly astonished. But from the audience’s perspective, almost nothing visible happened. She was sitting in a chair, looking at a piece of paper, and from ten meters away it looked like she was reading a menu.
Two weeks later, a different event, a different city. This time in Vienna, a standing reception before a keynote. I performed essentially the same piece, but the spectator was standing because there were no chairs available. When the impossible moment hit, she screamed. She jumped backward. She grabbed the arm of the person standing next to her. She bent forward at the waist, clutching the paper to her chest. She spun around to show it to her friends. The entire room turned to look.
Same effect. Same method. Same type of spectator. Same quality of interaction. But the reaction was an order of magnitude more visible, more dramatic, more contagious. And the only variable that had changed was whether the spectator was sitting or standing.
That night, in my hotel room, I started thinking seriously about something I had never considered before: the physical position of the spectator’s body determines the physical vocabulary of their reaction. And the physical vocabulary of the reaction determines whether the audience sees it or misses it.
The Physics of Reaction
When a person is sitting in a chair, their body is constrained. Their range of motion is limited by the chair arms, the table in front of them, the person sitting next to them. Their legs are bent, their weight is distributed across the seat, their center of gravity is low and stable. They can lean back. They can lean forward slightly. They can bring their hands to their face. They can shake their head. That is approximately the full range of physical reactions available to a seated person.
When a person is standing, everything changes. Their full body is available for expression. They can jump. They can stagger backward. They can spin around. They can double over. They can grab someone next to them. They can take three steps in any direction. They can collapse forward or throw their head back. Their arms can extend fully. Their legs can carry them away from the source of the astonishment or toward the nearest friend for support.
The standing spectator has access to the full range of human physical expression. The seated spectator has access to maybe twenty percent of it. And since the audience experiences the reaction primarily through visible physical movement, the standing spectator produces a dramatically more readable, more contagious, more impactful reaction.
This is not about the intensity of the internal experience. The seated woman in Salzburg was genuinely astonished — I could see it in her eyes from three feet away. But the audience could not see her eyes from thirty feet away. What they could see was her body, and her body was doing almost nothing because the chair was preventing it.
Why Mentalists Make This Mistake
The reason I kept having spectators sit was rooted in something reasonable. Mentalism, at its best, feels like a conversation. It feels intimate, personal, genuine. And conversations happen between seated people. When I studied mentalism, I absorbed the convention that close-up mentalism is best performed in an intimate, conversational setting — two people facing each other, perhaps at a table, certainly seated.
For close-up work in small groups, this is absolutely correct. Four people at a dinner table can read facial microexpressions — they can see the spectator’s eyes go wide, the subtle tremor in the hands. But the moment you scale up to eighty people in a conference room or two hundred at a gala, the intimate seated dynamic becomes a liability. Subtle reactions that are devastating at three feet are invisible at thirty feet.
Derren Brown describes in Absolute Magic the three stages of performer development, where the third stage involves reversing the dynamic so that the performance space operates on the performer’s terms. I think there is a parallel for spectator positioning. The first stage is defaulting to whatever is convenient — if there are chairs, you have them sit. The second stage is understanding that the spectator’s position matters for sightlines and audience engagement. The third stage is actively choosing the spectator’s physical position based on what kind of reaction you want to produce and what kind of room you are performing in.
The Standing Vocabulary
Once I started deliberately having spectators stand for pieces where I wanted maximum visible reaction, I began cataloging the physical reactions that became available. The vocabulary of standing reactions is remarkably rich.
The stagger. When the impossible moment hits, the spectator’s body involuntarily moves backward. Their weight shifts, their feet shuffle, they look like they have been physically pushed by the impossibility. This is one of the most readable reactions from a distance — the audience can see the entire body move, and the movement communicates shock more powerfully than any facial expression.
The grab. The standing spectator reaches for the nearest person — a friend, a stranger, anyone within arm’s reach. They grab an arm, a shoulder, a hand. This is a social reaction that immediately involves other people in the experience and creates a visual cluster of shared astonishment that draws even more attention.
The collapse. The spectator bends forward at the waist, sometimes bringing their hands to their knees, sometimes pressing the paper or prop against their chest. This full-body reaction is impossible while seated and is one of the most dramatic and readable physical responses to astonishment.
The spin. The spectator turns away from me and toward the audience, showing the paper or prop to people behind them, seeking confirmation that what they are seeing is real. This is an extraordinarily powerful moment because it turns the spectator into a communicator of the magic — they are not just reacting, they are sharing the reaction with others, which propagates the emotional wave through the room.
None of these reactions are possible for a seated spectator. Or rather, they are possible in muted, truncated versions that lack the visual impact. A seated person can lean back instead of staggering, clutch a neighbor’s arm instead of grabbing with full extension, bend forward in their chair instead of collapsing. Each seated version is smaller, less visible, and less contagious.
The Exception: When Sitting Works
I do not want to overstate this. There are situations where a seated spectator is the right choice.
If the piece is quiet, intimate, and designed for emotional depth rather than dramatic spectacle, a seated spectator can be more appropriate. Some mentalism pieces are best received in stillness — where the spectator’s wide eyes and whispered reaction create a hushed moment that a standing, screaming reaction would destroy. The quiet pieces need quiet reactions, and a seated spectator naturally produces them.
If the spectator is elderly, physically uncomfortable, or anxious about being on stage, offering a chair is an act of kindness that the audience notices and appreciates. Scott Alexander writes about the importance of treating volunteers with courtesy — helping them onto the stage, the whispered thank-you, all done with kindness. Sometimes kindness means giving someone a chair.
If the performance space does not allow for standing — a crowded dinner table, a theater with fixed seating — then sitting is the only option and you adapt accordingly.
But in the situations where I have a choice — which is most keynote stages, most corporate events, most standing receptions — I now choose standing for any piece where I want a visible, dramatic, room-filling reaction. And I choose sitting only when I want the opposite: a quiet, intimate, contained moment.
The Practical Transition
Getting a spectator to stand when they expect to sit requires some deliberate staging. At many corporate events, the default assumption is that anyone called on stage will be given a chair. There is often a chair sitting on the stage from the previous speaker’s presentation, and spectators gravititate toward it automatically.
My approach is simple: remove the option before the spectator arrives. If there is a chair on stage, I have it moved before my segment begins. If that is not possible, I position myself far enough from the chair that the spectator naturally comes to me rather than to it.
The language matters too. “Come up and join me” implies standing. “Come up and have a seat” implies sitting. I used to say the second one automatically, as a hospitality reflex. Now I say the first one. If a spectator explicitly asks to sit, I always accommodate them — the relationship with the spectator is more important than the staging geometry.
The Salzburg Correction
Six months after the original Salzburg event, I was booked at another corporate dinner in the same city. Similar format, similar audience size, similar room. This time, when I brought the spectator up for the mentalism piece, I had her stand.
The effect landed at the same level of impossibility. The spectator was a woman of similar age and disposition to the first one. But the reaction was unrecognizable. She staggered back two full steps. She spun to face the audience, holding the paper out in front of her. She covered her face with her free hand. She took three steps toward her table, stopped, came back, showed me the paper again, shook her head, and then finally went to her colleagues and let them see it.
The entire sequence took about ninety seconds, and the room was riveted for every moment of it. People at the back tables stood up to see what was happening. The energy in the room surged. I could feel the temperature change.
After the event, three different people approached me to say that the spectator’s reaction was the most memorable moment of the evening. Not the effect. Not what I did. Her reaction. Her face, her body, her movement through the space. The human being having a human experience in front of other human beings.
And all I had done differently was let her stand up.
The Broader Principle
The seated versus standing choice is really just one instance of a broader principle: the physical context of the spectator shapes the physical expression of their reaction, and that expression is the primary vehicle through which the audience experiences the magic.
My job is not just to create the impossible moment. My job is to create the physical conditions that allow the human reaction to be as visible, as dramatic, and as contagious as possible. And sometimes, the single most impactful thing I can do is remove a chair.