The moment that crystallized this principle for me happened at a private corporate event outside Vienna, maybe two years into my performing life. I was doing a piece that involved a small wooden box. The box was empty at the start, and through the course of the routine, something appeared inside it. Standard premise, nothing unusual.
What was unusual was the question a woman in the front row asked before I had even begun the effect. She looked at the box sitting on my table, tilted her head, and said, quite casually: “What’s in the box?”
I said, “Nothing — it’s empty.”
She said, “Then why is it there?”
The table went quiet for a beat. I smiled and moved into the routine, and the effect went fine. But her question stayed with me for weeks afterward, because she had identified something I had been completely blind to: the box was on the table for no contextually logical reason. It was sitting there because I needed it for the trick. But in the world of the story — in the world of a normal human standing at a table talking to people — an empty box on a table has no reason to exist.
She was not trying to catch me. She was not a heckler. She was simply responding to a contextual cue that did not make sense, and her response was entirely natural. Why is there an empty box on the table?
That question changed how I think about every prop I place in front of an audience.
The Contextual Logic Problem
Here is the issue, stated plainly: magicians put things on tables that normal people would never put on tables. And audiences notice, even when they do not say anything.
An empty box. A stack of envelopes with nothing written on them. A glass that is upside down for no apparent reason. A rope coiled on a surface where ropes do not normally appear. A deck of cards sitting out when no one has suggested a card game. Each of these, to the performer, is a prop — a necessary element waiting to be used. To the audience, each one is a tiny puzzle, a small violation of normalcy that triggers a low-level alert: something is about to happen with that object.
That alert is the opposite of what you want. If the audience has already identified which objects are going to be involved in the trick before the trick begins, they are watching with analytical attention rather than experiential attention. They are solving the puzzle before you have posed it. They are thinking “I bet the box is important” instead of being immersed in the narrative.
The solution, which sounds almost absurdly simple, is to give every prop a contextually logical reason to be present.
Put Flowers in the Vase
The principle I adopted comes from a concept in Hamilton’s writing about props serving the story: a vase should have flowers in it, because that is what vases are for. If you use a vase in your performance and it is sitting empty on the table, the audience knows — before you do anything — that the vase is a trick prop. Its emptiness is a confession. It says “I am empty because something is going to appear in me, or disappear from me, or happen to me.”
But put flowers in the vase, and it becomes a vase. A normal object doing what vases do. It has a reason to be on the table that has nothing to do with magic. It is contextually logical. And when the magical moment arrives — when the vase becomes part of the effect — the surprise is genuine, because the audience was not watching the vase with suspicion. They were not watching it at all. It was just a vase with flowers.
This principle extends to everything. A box on a table is suspicious. A box on a table with a few items in it — pens, a notepad, a business card holder — is an organizer. It has a reason to exist. An envelope is suspicious. An envelope with a stamp and an address written on it is a letter. A glass is suspicious when it is upside down. A glass with water in it is a drink.
The effort required to transform a suspicious prop into a contextually logical one is minimal. A few flowers. A stamp. Some water. But the narrative difference is enormous. The prop moves from the category of “things the magician will use for a trick” to the category of “things that are just there.” And “things that are just there” do not get watched with analytical eyes.
My Table Before and After
Let me describe what my performing table looked like two years ago versus what it looks like now, because the contrast illustrates the principle better than any theory.
Two years ago: a close-up mat with a deck of cards, a small box, three envelopes, and a marker. Everything neatly arranged, everything visible, everything obviously waiting to be used. The table looked like a display at a magic convention. Every item was a signal: “these are the props, these will be involved in tricks.” An observant audience member could have catalogued the program from the table setup.
Now: a close-up mat with a small leather folio (the kind you might carry into a meeting), a glass of water, a pen, and what appears to be a personal notebook. The folio contains the envelopes I need, but it looks like a business accessory, not a magic prop. The pen is the marker I use, but it looks like a writing instrument, not a performance tool. The notebook is real — I actually use it for notes during keynote preparations. The deck of cards is in a leather case inside my jacket, not on the table.
When I walk to the table now, it looks like I set down my things the way any professional would before speaking. It does not look like a magic setup. The audience does not scan the table and categorize props. They glance at it and see nothing unusual. Nothing triggers the analytical alert.
And when the moment arrives to bring an item into the performance — to open the folio, to uncap the pen, to produce the deck — it carries the force of surprise, because the object was hiding in plain sight inside a contextually logical frame.
The Analytical Reflex
There is a deeper principle at work here, one that Darwin Ortiz articulates clearly: the effect happens in the spectator’s mind. Everything the performer does exists to create a psychological event. And one of the most powerful psychological events in magic is the moment when an object the audience was not paying attention to suddenly becomes the center of an impossibility.
That moment requires the audience to have not been paying attention. Which requires the object to have not seemed important. Which requires the object to have a contextually logical reason to exist that has nothing to do with magic.
If the object was clearly a prop from the beginning, the moment of surprise is diminished. The audience expected something to happen with that object. They were waiting for it. The surprise is not “how did that happen” but “ah, there it is — I knew that box was going to be used.” The analytical reflex — the impulse to figure out the trick before it happens — was activated by the prop’s presence, and the activation weakened the eventual effect.
When the object was contextually invisible, the analytical reflex was never triggered. The audience was not watching. And the surprise is genuine: “wait, that was just a — how did —” The effect is stronger because the audience’s guard was down, and the guard was down because the prop gave them no reason to raise it.
Everyday Objects as Cover
This principle pushed me toward using everyday objects whenever possible. Not because everyday objects are inherently better for magic — they are not, in terms of method — but because everyday objects are inherently more contextually logical. A pen is a pen. A business card is a business card. A phone is a phone. These objects do not need a justification for being present. They belong in any professional setting. They are invisible.
When I perform in corporate contexts, I lean heavily on objects the audience would expect to see in a business setting. This is not a limitation — it is a strength. The corporate environment provides a rich vocabulary of contextually logical objects. Notepads, folders, name badges, pens, glasses, phones, business cards. All of these can participate in effects without ever triggering the “that’s a trick prop” alarm.
The trade-off is that you lose some of the visual drama of dedicated magic props. A beautiful hand-painted card box is more visually striking than a leather folio. A custom-made prediction chest is more theatrical than a sealed envelope. But what you gain is invisibility — the deep, structural invisibility of an object that the audience’s brain has categorized as “not relevant” and therefore not worth watching.
The Pre-Show Scan
I now do a pre-show scan of my performing space specifically for contextual logic violations. Before the audience arrives, I stand at the back of the room and look at my setup the way they will see it. I ask: is there anything on that table that does not have an obvious, non-magical reason to be there?
If the answer is yes, I either give it a reason or I hide it until it is needed.
Giving it a reason is usually the better option. A prop that is produced from a pocket or a bag mid-performance carries a different energy than one that was sitting on the table all along. The production from a pocket says “here is something new.” The object on the table, when properly contextualized, says “this was here the whole time and you never noticed.”
Both are useful. But the second is more powerful, because it creates a retroactive surprise — the audience re-evaluates their memory of the table and realizes they were looking at the instrument of impossibility without knowing it. That re-evaluation is itself a form of astonishment. It is the feeling of “it was right there, right in front of me, and I did not see it.”
When the Prop Has No Logical Cover
Not every prop can be disguised as an everyday object. Some effects require items that simply do not appear in normal life. In those cases, the principle still applies, but the solution shifts from disguise to narrative justification.
If I need to use an unusual object — something that has no business being on a corporate dinner table — I give it a story that explains its presence. “I was given this by a colleague who collects unusual artifacts” or “I found this at a market in Istanbul and I have been carrying it with me ever since.” The story does not need to be elaborate. It needs to answer the implicit question the audience has the moment they see an unusual object: why is that there?
Without the story, the object is a prop. With the story, the object is an artifact — something with a past, a provenance, a reason to exist in this specific moment. The narrative wrapping does for an unusual object what flowers do for a vase: it provides the contextual logic that prevents the analytical reflex from activating.
The Compound Effect
Here is what I have found after applying this principle consistently for over a year: the compound effect is dramatic.
Any single contextual logic fix is a small thing. Flowers in a vase. Water in a glass. A pen that looks like a real pen. Small. But when every prop on the table passes the contextual logic test, the cumulative effect is profound. The entire setup reads as “normal.” The audience’s analytical defenses, which are primed to detect trick props, find nothing to lock onto. They relax. They settle into the experience rather than scanning the environment for clues.
And when the magic happens, it happens against a backdrop of normality. The impossible event stands out in stark contrast to an environment that looked entirely ordinary. The contrast — ordinary world, extraordinary event — is what makes magic feel like magic rather than like a demonstration of unusual objects doing what they were obviously designed to do.
The Woman’s Question, Revisited
I think about that woman in Vienna more than she would probably believe. “Why is it there?” Four words that exposed a blind spot I did not know I had.
The truth is, audiences are always asking that question. They just usually do not say it out loud. They ask it silently, subconsciously, every time they look at your table and see an object that has no business being there. And each time they ask it, a small thread of the narrative loosens. Each unexplained prop is a tiny crack in the world you are building.
Put flowers in the vase. Fill the glass with water. Give the box something to hold. Make every object on your table earn its place in the world of the story, not just in the sequence of the effects.
The audience should walk away thinking about the impossibility of what they experienced. They should not walk away thinking “I knew that box was important the moment I saw it.” If they identified your props before you used them, you did not fool them — they were waiting for you. And an audience that is waiting for you is an audience that has already stepped outside the story.
Give them no reason to step outside. Give them a world where everything makes sense — right up until the moment it does not. That is where the magic lives.