Let me describe two performances. Both happened in the same month, both for roughly the same size audience — about sixty people. Same material, same energy, same performer. But the experiences were so different that I spent weeks trying to figure out what had happened.
The first was at a company dinner in a hotel outside Klagenfurt. The room was a mid-sized banquet hall, and the tables were arranged in a tight horseshoe pattern. The chairs were close — closer than what most people would consider comfortable for a relaxed dinner. When someone laughed, the person next to them felt the vibration. When someone gasped, the sound carried across the room like a wave. The energy built throughout the evening. My close was a mentalism piece that ended in genuine stunned silence, followed by the kind of sustained applause that you feel in your chest.
The second was at a corporate awards ceremony in a cavernous event space in Vienna. The organizers had set up round tables of eight, but the tables were generously spaced — plenty of room between them for waitstaff to circulate, for guests to move freely, for the event to feel “spacious and premium.” The chairs at each table were comfortable, with armrests, and there was ample elbow room.
I performed the same material. The audience was attentive, polite, and largely silent. Laughter came in isolated pockets — one table would laugh, and the sound would dissipate into the two-meter gap before reaching the next table. The applause was steady but never gathered the momentum I had felt in Klagenfurt. I walked off stage feeling like I had performed in a library.
Same performer. Same material. Radically different outcomes. The difference was the chairs.
The Physics of Shared Experience
This is not mysticism. This is physics. Or perhaps social physics — the mechanics of how human beings experience emotions in proximity to other human beings.
Ken Weber is emphatic about this in Maximum Entertainment. Chairs closer together equal a better show. The reasoning is not complicated: people need to hear other people’s reactions. Laughter is contagious, but only when you can hear it. Gasps spread through a crowd, but only when the crowd is close enough for the sound to propagate. Applause builds on applause, but only when the individual contributions overlap and reinforce each other.
When chairs are spread out, every reaction becomes isolated. The woman who gasps at the climax of a routine does so alone. Her gasp does not reach the couple three meters away, who are having their own private experience. The man who laughs does not trigger the chain reaction that turns a chuckle into a wave of hilarity across the room. Each audience member is essentially watching a solo performance in their own bubble.
When chairs are close together, the opposite happens. One person’s reaction becomes a catalyst for the next person’s reaction. The emotional experience stops being individual and starts being communal. And communal experience is always — always — more intense than individual experience.
Why Venues Get This Wrong
I have never walked into a venue where the default seating arrangement was too tight. Not once. Every venue I have ever performed at, without exception, defaults to too much space between seats. And there is a simple reason for this: venue staff optimize for comfort and service access, not for audience energy.
From the venue’s perspective, more space between tables means easier access for waitstaff. More space between chairs means guests feel less cramped. Spacious layouts look premium. Tight layouts look budget. The entire incentive structure of venue management pushes toward spreading people out.
From the performer’s perspective, every additional inch of space between audience members is a leak in the emotional container. You are trying to create a shared experience, and the venue is unwittingly creating conditions that prevent it.
This is why arriving early matters so much. If you arrive after the room is set and the guests are seated, you are stuck with what you have. If you arrive while the room is being set up, you can influence the arrangement. And this is one of the highest-leverage adjustments you can make.
The Dan Harlan Principle: Work Wide, Not Deep
Dan Harlan articulates a complementary principle in his Tarbell lecture that took me a long time to fully appreciate. His golden rule of staging is simple: work wide, not deep. Position yourself along the long wall of a rectangular room. Spread the audience wide in fewer rows rather than many rows deep.
The math is illuminating. Fifty people can sit in three wide rows or eight deep rows. In three wide rows, the furthest audience member is perhaps five meters from you. In eight deep rows, the furthest audience member is fifteen meters away. The person in the back of eight rows deep is watching a fundamentally different show than the person in the front row. The person in the third row of a wide arrangement is still close enough to feel connected.
This principle works in tandem with Weber’s chair proximity rule. Wide and close. Few rows, tightly packed. The audience is both near to you and near to each other. The result is a room where energy has nowhere to leak.
I have applied this in practice more times than I can count. At a recent keynote in Graz, the room was set up theater-style in the classic deep configuration — twelve rows of chairs stretching back from the stage. The organizer had set up for an audience of a hundred and fifty, but the actual attendance was closer to ninety. I arrived two hours early, and after my walkthrough, I asked the venue staff if we could remove the back four rows and widen the remaining eight rows by adding chairs to the sides. They looked at me like I was making an unusual request, but they agreed.
The result was transformative. Instead of ninety people scattered across twelve rows with empty seats dotting the back, we had ninety people in eight wide rows with almost no empty seats visible. The room felt full. The energy was concentrated. And the performance was dramatically better than it would have been in the original configuration.
The Enemy: Dead Space Between You and the Front Row
There is another dimension to this that Weber emphasizes and that I have become almost obsessive about: the distance between the performer and the front row.
In many venues, there is a gap — sometimes a large gap — between the performance area and the first row of seats. This might be a dance floor, a buffer zone the venue considers standard, or simply the result of tables being placed a “respectful” distance from the stage. Whatever the reason, this dead space is poison for a performer.
The gap creates a physical and psychological barrier between you and the audience. You are up there. They are back there. The separation communicates formality, distance, detachment. Every meter of dead space makes it harder to establish the intimate connection that great performance depends on.
My approach is to close that gap as aggressively as the venue will allow. I want the front row as close to me as possible. If there are tables, I want the nearest table close enough that I could reach out and touch it. If it is theater-style seating, I want the front row within two meters of where I will be standing.
This sometimes requires negotiation. Event organizers often have a vision of the room that includes elegant spacing and a generous stage buffer. I have learned to frame the request in terms of the audience’s experience: “If we bring the front row closer, your guests will feel more like they are part of the show rather than watching it from a distance. It creates a more intimate, premium experience.” In my experience, once you frame it as being about the guest experience rather than the performer’s preference, most organizers agree.
The Back-Row Problem
Weber identifies a behavioral tendency that I have observed at virtually every event I have performed at: people gravitate to the back. Given a choice, most audience members will bypass the front rows and head for the seats further from the performer. This is human nature. The back row feels safe. It feels anonymous. It feels like a place where you can observe without being observed.
The problem is that a room with empty front rows and a packed back section is an energy disaster. The performer is straining to connect across empty seats. The audience in the back is too far away to feel the intimacy. And the visual impression — both for the performer and for the audience themselves — is one of a sparsely attended event, even if the total number of people is respectable.
Weber’s solution is direct: remove the excess back rows. If you have sixty guests and eighty chairs, do not arrange eighty chairs and hope the front fills up. Arrange sixty-five chairs and remove the rest. If the room is large and the audience is small, rope off the back sections and actively guide people to the front.
I have adopted a slightly softer version of this approach that works well in the Austrian corporate context, where overt direction can feel heavy-handed. I ask the event coordinator to place reserved signs or table decorations on the front tables, making them appear designated rather than available. I ask the staff to seat early arrivals at the front. And when I mingle with guests before the show — which I always do — I casually position myself near the front of the room, which naturally draws people toward that area.
The goal is not to force anyone into an uncomfortable seat. The goal is to create conditions where the front fills first, so that by the time the show begins, the audience is concentrated close to the performance area rather than scattered across a wide expanse.
The Conference Room Problem
Not every performance happens in a ballroom or theater. Some of my most challenging setups have been in corporate conference rooms — the kind with a long rectangular table, leather executive chairs, and a screen at one end for PowerPoint presentations. These rooms are designed for meetings, not performances.
The conference room poses a specific version of the spacing problem. People sit in their assigned or habitual seats, usually with deliberate gaps between them. The table creates a physical barrier between the performer and the audience. The room is lit with cold overhead fluorescents. The atmosphere says “quarterly review,” not “extraordinary experience.”
In these situations, I cannot always reconfigure the room. But I can make adjustments. I move to the end of the table rather than standing behind a lectern. I ask if the overhead lights can be dimmed even slightly. I position myself so that I am not behind the table but beside it, closing the physical gap between me and the nearest audience members. I use the table itself as part of the performance — placing props on it, asking the nearest person to hold something, turning the meeting furniture into a performance surface.
The principle is the same whether I am in a grand ballroom or a twelve-person conference room: close the distance. Minimize the gaps. Create the conditions for shared experience rather than isolated observation.
What the Audience Never Knows
The audience never knows any of this happened. They do not know that the chairs were repositioned. They do not know that three rows were removed from the back. They do not know that the front tables were seeded with early arrivals. They do not know that the temperature was adjusted. They do not know that the dead space between the stage and the front row was halved from the venue’s default.
What they know is that the show felt different. It felt intimate. It felt electric. Laughter was easy. Reactions were big. The energy in the room was palpable.
They attribute this to the performer. To the material. To the “vibe” of the evening. And those things matter, of course. But underneath all of them, invisible and unacknowledged, is the simple fact that the chairs were close together. That the audience was concentrated rather than dispersed. That the physical conditions of the room were designed to create the emotional conditions for a great experience.
This is what production means. Not expensive equipment. Not elaborate staging. Just the relentless, unglamorous work of making the room right before anyone walks into it.