The idea came from a line I read in Cara Hamilton’s guide on storytelling for magicians: “Go to a storytelling centre or festival. You will find the experience of pure storytelling most revealing. It will show you the true value of the tale as you are stripped of tricks.” At the time, I filed it away as one of those recommendations you intend to follow but never quite get around to. Then a colleague mentioned a storytelling event happening in Vienna the following weekend — not a theatre production, not a spoken word night, but an actual storytelling gathering where people stood up and told stories without props, without slides, without anything except their voice and their body and whatever happened to be true.
I went. I left my cards at the hotel. I left everything at the hotel. I sat in the second row of a small venue and watched six people, one after another, stand in a pool of warm light and tell stories.
I did not expect to be changed by the experience. I was. Here is what happened, and here is what it taught me.
The First Thing I Noticed: No One Was Hiding
The first storyteller was a woman in her fifties. She told a story about getting lost in a forest as a child and the strange calm that came over her when she realized no one was coming. That was the entire premise. No dramatic rescue. No villain. No twist ending. Just a woman standing in front of fifty people describing, in meticulous sensory detail, what it felt like to be seven years old and alone among trees.
She had nothing to hide behind. No table to stand behind, no deck to manipulate, no prop to direct attention to. She could not fill an awkward moment by doing something with her hands. She could not cover a weak section by producing a visual surprise. She had only the story and the way she told it.
And the room was silent. Not polite silence. The kind of silence where you become aware of your own breathing because it suddenly seems loud.
I realized, watching her, that much of what I did on stage was hiding. Not deliberately, not consciously, but functionally. When a section of my patter was weak, I covered it with a visual moment. When a transition felt clunky, I smoothed it over with a prop change. When I was not sure whether the audience was with me, I did something impressive with my hands and let the technique carry the moment.
The storyteller had none of these tools. She had to hold the room with nothing but narrative. And she did it — easily, naturally, completely. Which forced me to confront an uncomfortable question: could I?
The Power of the Pause, Stripped Bare
The second storyteller was a man telling a story about his father’s funeral. He reached a moment in the story where he was standing at the lectern in the church, looking out at the assembled mourners, and his mind went blank. He could not remember the eulogy he had prepared.
And then — on stage at the storytelling event — he paused. He just stopped talking. For what felt like ten seconds but was probably four or five. He stood there, in the memory, in the blankness, and let us sit in it with him.
I had read about the power of pauses in a dozen sources. Hamilton writes extensively about how pauses give the audience permission to be astonished, how they create space for the audience to invest themselves in the narrative. I had practiced pauses in my own performances. But I had never felt the full weight of a pause until I experienced one without any magic around it.
In a magic performance, a pause before a reveal creates anticipation for the reveal. The pause serves the technical moment. In pure storytelling, a pause serves the emotional moment. It says: what just happened matters, and we are all going to sit in it together until it has done its work. The audience does not need a reveal to justify the silence. The silence is the point.
This distinction changed how I use pauses in my own performances. I started inserting pauses not just before reveals, but after emotional beats in my stories. After describing a moment of failure. After sharing something vulnerable. After saying something that I wanted the audience to feel rather than just hear. These non-reveal pauses are harder to hold, because there is no technical payoff coming to break the tension. You are just standing in silence, trusting that the emotional content is enough.
It is. It always is. The storytelling festival taught me that.
The Whisper That Filled the Room
The third storyteller told a ghost story — not a horror story, but one of those old-fashioned tales about a presence in an old house, told with the measured cadence of someone who half-believed it themselves. At the climax of the story, she dropped her voice to a whisper.
The effect was electric. The room contracted. Fifty people leaned forward simultaneously, as if pulled by a string. The whisper was quiet enough that you had to concentrate to hear every word, and that concentration was itself a form of engagement that no amount of volume could achieve.
Hamilton writes about this: “Lovers whisper sweet nothings and spies whisper secrets.” The whisper is personal, intimate, powerful. It communicates that what you are saying is of more value than a shout. I had used the whisper technique in my performances before, but always in a scripted way — dropping my voice at a predetermined moment for a predetermined effect. Watching this storyteller, I saw the whisper used not as a technique but as an instinct. She whispered because the story demanded it. The story was about something quiet and strange, and her voice matched the content.
I came home and re-examined every moment in my performances where I used vocal variation. Was I varying my voice because the story demanded it, or because a technique book told me to? The honest answer was: mostly the latter. I had been applying vocal dynamics like a checklist — loud here, soft here, fast here, slow here — rather than letting the emotional content of my own narrative determine the delivery.
The fix was not to throw out the checklist. The checklist is useful for learning the tools. But the tools need to be in service of something genuine. When you whisper because the story is whispering, the audience feels truth. When you whisper because your script says “[whisper],” the audience feels technique.
The Story I Told
On the second evening of the festival, there was an open floor. Anyone could stand up and tell a story. The stories had to be true. You had three minutes.
I do not know why I raised my hand. Possibly because Hamilton’s challenge — to strip yourself of tricks and see what remains — was ringing in my ears. Possibly because I had been moved by what I had witnessed the night before and wanted to contribute something, however small. Possibly because some competitive instinct told me that if I could do this, it would prove something I needed to prove to myself.
I stood up and told the story of buying my first deck of cards from ellusionist.com while traveling for work. How I sat in a hotel room in some city I can no longer remember and watched a tutorial video and spent an hour trying to make a card change happen. How bad I was. How the card kept flashing, how the angles were wrong, how I felt ridiculous — a grown man in a hotel room, failing at something any twelve-year-old with decent hands could probably figure out in twenty minutes.
And then how, on maybe the fortieth or fiftieth attempt, something clicked. Not perfection — not even close. But a moment where the card seemed to change without visible effort, and I saw, for just an instant, what it could look like. What it could feel like to someone watching. And the electric thrill of that — the realization that I was holding something in my hands that could make the impossible visible.
That was my story. No trick at the end. No reveal. Just a consultant in a hotel room, alone with a deck of cards and a laptop, discovering something that would reshape the next decade of his life.
The audience listened. When I finished, there was a moment of silence — the good kind, the kind the festival had taught me to recognize — and then applause. Not polite clapping. Real warmth. From people who knew nothing about magic, who had no reason to care about card technique, who connected not with the trick but with the human experience of discovering something that changes you.
What I Brought Home
I brought home three things from that festival, and all three have been woven into my performances since.
First: the story must work without the magic. If you strip away every effect, every technique, every visual surprise, and the narrative cannot stand on its own — if it does not make someone feel something — then the narrative needs work. The magic should amplify a story that is already worth telling. It should not be a life-support system for a narrative that cannot breathe on its own.
Second: the audience connects with truth, not with impressiveness. The moments that hit hardest at the festival were not the most dramatic or the most polished. They were the most honest. A woman describing childhood loneliness. A man standing in silence at his father’s funeral. These were not crafted for maximum impact. They were true, and truth has its own gravitational pull.
Third: you must be willing to be seen. Not your character, not your persona, not the version of yourself that you have constructed for the stage. You. The person behind the performance, with all their imperfections and uncertainties and genuine enthusiasms. At the festival, there was nowhere to hide, and the performers who thrived were the ones who did not want to hide. They wanted to be seen, and they trusted that who they were was enough.
I still perform magic. I still use techniques and effects and the visual vocabulary of impossibility. These are powerful tools, and I love them. But beneath every effect, supporting it, giving it weight and meaning and emotional resonance, there is now a story. A real story, told in my real voice, about something that genuinely matters to me.
The festival taught me that the story is not the frame around the magic. The story is the foundation under it. And the foundation must be strong enough to stand on its own, because that is what holds everything else up.
Hamilton was right. The experience of pure storytelling is most revealing. It showed me the true value of the tale.
And it showed me what I was missing.