There is a thought experiment I run on myself periodically, usually late at night in a hotel room when I am replaying a recent performance in my head. The experiment is simple: take my act and remove every trick. Remove every card change, every prediction reveal, every moment of visible impossibility. What is left?
The first time I ran this experiment, what remained was almost nothing. Some fumbling between effects. Some filler phrases I used to transition from one trick to the next. A few jokes that only worked in the context of the trick they accompanied. Without the tricks, my act was a series of empty containers — presentation structures with nothing inside them and nothing connecting them.
That realization was humbling in a way that learning a difficult sleight never is. Because it told me something I did not want to hear: the tricks were doing all the heavy lifting. I, as a performer, was doing almost none of it. I was a trick-delivery system. Remove the delivery, and there was no system left.
The Empty Space
The theatre director Peter Brook wrote about the concept of the empty space — the idea that you can take any empty space and call it a bare stage, and that everything meaningful in theatre happens in what fills that space. It is a useful frame for thinking about what magic should be. The stage is empty. The tricks are one thing that fills it. But what else fills it? What is in the space between the tricks? What is in the space around them? What occupies the empty moments, the pauses, the transitions?
For most of my early performing life, nothing occupied those spaces. They were dead time. They were the moments where I reached for the next prop, shuffled a deck, or said something generic like “Now for my next piece…” The tricks were islands of activity in an ocean of nothing.
I have since come to believe that those “nothing” moments are where the real magic lives. Not the tricks themselves — the space between and around them. The way you stand. The way you look at someone. The quality of silence you create before something impossible happens. The feeling in the room when you pause and let a moment land instead of rushing to the next effect.
What You Communicate When You Are Not Doing a Trick
Derren Brown makes a point that has become one of the most important ideas in how I think about performance: magic is not inherently anything. It is not inherently wonderful, or cathartic, or important. Magic is only what you communicate it to be. And if you do not communicate anything, it is nothing — just puzzles, just cleverness, just a series of “how did he do that” questions that fade from memory within hours.
The implication is that everything you do — and everything you do not do — communicates something to the audience. Your posture communicates. Your eye contact communicates. Your silence communicates. The speed at which you move between effects communicates. The way you handle a borrowed ring or a chosen card communicates something about how seriously you take this moment, this person, this exchange.
When I removed the tricks from my act in my thought experiment, I was forced to confront what my between-trick moments were communicating. And the answer was: almost nothing intentional. I was communicating nervousness (rushing between effects), uncertainty (filling silence with unnecessary words), and the implicit message that the tricks were the only things worth watching and everything else was housekeeping.
The audience was picking up on all of this. They just were not telling me, because audiences rarely articulate what makes a performance feel hollow. They say things like “That was cool” or “That was fun” — vague compliments that disguise the fact that nothing really connected, nothing lingered, nothing made them feel like they had experienced something beyond a sequence of puzzles.
The Grand Effect Revisited
This connects directly to the concept of the Grand Effect that I wrote about recently. The Grand Effect — the total impression you leave on an audience — is not built from tricks alone. It is built from everything: the tricks, yes, but also the spaces between them, the way you carry yourself, the emotional journey you take the audience on, the feeling in the room when you are not performing anything visible.
Think of it this way. A great restaurant meal is not just the food. It is the ambiance, the service, the pacing between courses, the temperature of the room, the weight of the silverware in your hand. A chef who makes extraordinary dishes but serves them on paper plates under fluorescent lighting in a noisy cafeteria has not created a great dining experience. The food is excellent. Everything else undermines it.
Similarly, a magician who performs extraordinary tricks but fills the spaces between them with nothing — no character, no presence, no intentional communication — has not created a Grand Effect. The tricks are excellent. Everything else is a paper plate.
Building the Negative Space
In visual art, negative space — the empty area around and between the subjects of an image — is not nothing. It is a compositional choice. It shapes how the viewer perceives the positive space. A skilled artist uses negative space as deliberately as they use line or color.
I started treating the non-trick moments of my performance as negative space that needed to be designed, not just tolerated. This did not mean filling every pause with words or activity. It meant making intentional choices about what those pauses would feel like.
Before a prediction reveal, there is a moment of stillness where the audience is suspended between anticipation and uncertainty. I used to rush through that moment because it felt uncomfortable — I knew the reveal was the strong part, so I wanted to get to it. Now I hold that silence. I let the room feel it. I look at the person whose prediction I am about to open, and I take an extra beat. The trick has not changed. But the moment before it has, and the audience’s experience of the trick is fundamentally different because of what the silence communicated.
Between effects, there is a transition where I used to say things like “Okay, so let me show you something else.” Generic. Empty. A verbal placeholder that communicated nothing except “the next trick is starting.” I replaced those transitions with moments that connect the previous effect to the next one — not with a script, but with a genuine acknowledgment of what just happened and a natural pivot to what is coming. Sometimes that is a question to the audience. Sometimes it is a brief personal reflection. Sometimes it is just a look and a smile. The point is that it is intentional, not accidental.
The Vision Test
Here is a test I now apply regularly: if someone watched my performance on mute — no audio, just the visual — would they still get a sense of who I am and what this experience is about?
If the answer is yes, the non-trick elements are doing their job. My physicality, my relationship with the audience, my timing, my spatial choices — all of these should communicate something even without sound. The presence should be felt even when the words are removed.
If the answer is no — if the muted performance looks like a person doing mechanical things with objects and occasionally making gestures — then the performance is relying too heavily on the tricks and the patter, and the underlying character and vision are too thin.
I failed this test badly the first few times I tried it. I watched video of myself performing with the sound off and saw someone who looked busy but not compelling. Someone executing a sequence but not inhabiting a role. The tricks looked clean. The person performing them looked generic.
The Question That Changed My Practice
Once I understood that the space between tricks mattered as much as the tricks themselves, my practice changed. I started rehearsing transitions as carefully as I rehearsed effects. I started paying attention to what my body was doing during the “dead time” — the moments when I was not actively performing a trick but was still on stage, still visible, still communicating.
I discovered that I had several unconscious habits during transitions: looking down at my props, turning my body away from the audience to reach for something, dropping my energy between effects as though the performance had temporarily paused. None of this was intentional. All of it was communicating something I did not want to communicate: that the important parts were over and the unimportant parts had begun.
The fix was not complicated, but it required awareness. I started maintaining eye contact with the audience during transitions. I started keeping my energy consistent between effects, rather than letting it drop and then ramping it back up. I started treating the transition as a performance moment rather than a backstage moment that happened to occur on stage.
The difference was noticeable. Not in any single dramatic way, but in the overall feeling of the performance. People started describing my shows differently. Instead of “He did some great tricks,” I started hearing things like “There was something about the whole thing” or “I cannot put my finger on it, but it felt different from other magic I have seen.” These are vague comments, but they are vague in exactly the right way — they describe an experience, not a list of events.
What Remains Is You
The thought experiment I described at the beginning — remove all the tricks and see what remains — is not a one-time exercise. It is a diagnostic tool I return to regularly. Every time I change my set, add a new piece, or perform in a new context, I run the experiment again. What is left when the tricks are gone?
The answer should be: you. Your character. Your vision. Your way of being in a room with people. Your relationship with the audience. The feeling that something meaningful is happening, even before anything impossible occurs.
If what remains is nothing — if removing the tricks leaves an empty shell — then the tricks are doing all the work, and the performance is fragile. A single trick that does not land can collapse the entire experience because there is nothing else holding it up.
If what remains is a presence, a character, a way of engaging people that is compelling in its own right — then the tricks become amplifiers of something that was already powerful. A single trick that does not land is a minor stumble in an experience that has far more going for it than any individual moment.
The real magic is not in the tricks. The real magic is in what remains when you take them away.