There was a period — maybe six months into seriously performing — when I believed I was doing something meaningful with my magic. I had developed what I thought was a thoughtful presentation for a card routine, one that explored the idea of choices and how we convince ourselves they are free when they may not be. The theme felt personal. It connected to my work in strategy consulting, where I spend most of my time thinking about decision-making and cognitive bias. The idea was that the audience would experience the magic as a demonstration of how easily our perceptions can be guided without our awareness.
I was proud of this routine. I felt something when I performed it. A sense of purpose that went beyond “watch me do a trick.” I was not just showing them something impossible. I was showing them something true about how their minds work.
Then a friend filmed one of my performances at a private event in Linz. I watched the footage the next morning in my hotel room. And what I saw was a guy doing card tricks. That is it. A man holding cards, talking about cards, moving cards around, producing a card. The theme I had been feeling so deeply — the one about choices and perception and the illusion of free will — was invisible. It existed in my head. It did not exist in the performance.
I could feel the gap between what I intended and what I communicated, and it was enormous.
The Hardest Sentence I Have Read About Magic
Derren Brown writes in Absolute Magic: “If you don’t communicate it, it doesn’t exist, and you’re not doing what you think you’re doing.”
That sentence hit me harder than anything else I have encountered in my study of this art. Not because it was surprising in the abstract — of course the audience can only experience what you show them — but because it forced me to confront a specific, uncomfortable truth about my own performing. I had been living inside a rich internal experience that the audience was not sharing. My intentions were real. My vision was sincere. But none of it was reaching the people sitting across from me.
The gap between intention and communication is one of the most common problems in performance, and one of the hardest to detect. The performer feels the depth of what they are doing. The audience sees the surface. And because the performer’s internal experience is so vivid, they assume it is visible. They confuse feeling something with communicating something.
I was doing exactly that. Feeling the meaning of my routine and assuming the meaning was self-evident. It was not.
Why the Gap Exists
The gap between what you intend and what you communicate exists for a simple reason: the audience has no access to your internal world. They cannot hear your thoughts. They do not know your artistic intentions. They have not read the books you have read or considered the themes you have considered. They are working with exactly and only what you give them: your words, your body language, your timing, your eye contact, your props, your presentation, and the associations those things trigger in their minds.
If the theme of your routine is the fragility of perception, but your words are “Pick a card, any card,” and your body language says “Watch my hands,” the audience will experience a card trick about cards. The theme lives only in your head. It does not survive the journey from your mind to theirs because you never built a bridge.
This is not the audience’s fault. It is not a failure of attention or intelligence on their part. It is a failure of communication on yours. The audience is doing exactly what they should be doing — responding to what is in front of them. If what is in front of them is a card trick with no visible theme, they will experience a card trick with no visible theme.
The Hotel Room Audit
After watching that footage in Linz, I started what I now think of as a communication audit. I went through my working repertoire — every effect I performed regularly — and asked a single question about each one: what does the audience actually experience?
Not what I intend them to experience. Not what I feel when I perform it. Not what the routine is “about” in my head. What does someone sitting at the table, with no access to my inner life, actually see and hear and feel?
The answers were humbling. Several of my routines had themes that existed only in my mind. Others had themes I thought I was communicating through subtle implications that were, in retrospect, far too subtle to register. One mentalism piece I was particularly proud of — built around the idea that we unconsciously telegraph our decisions — had exactly one sentence in the entire script that referenced the theme. One sentence, surrounded by minutes of procedural patter that could have accompanied any mentalism effect.
One sentence is not communication. One sentence is a seed that needs an entire garden around it to take root.
The Difference Between Subtext and Absence
There is a crucial distinction here that I wrestled with for weeks. Subtext is real and powerful. Not everything in a performance needs to be stated explicitly. A look can communicate more than a paragraph. A pause can carry an entire emotional arc. The best performances often leave space for the audience to fill in meaning on their own.
But subtext requires text. You cannot have subtext without text. You cannot communicate something beneath the surface if there is nothing on the surface to work with. The subtle look only carries meaning if the audience has been given enough context to interpret it. The pregnant pause only resonates if the audience knows what they are waiting for.
What I had been doing was not subtext. It was absence. The theme of my routines was not implied beneath the surface — it was simply not there, anywhere, in any form the audience could detect. I had confused having an intention with communicating an intention. I had confused feeling something with showing something.
The difference between subtext and absence is the difference between a painting with hidden depth and a blank canvas that the artist insists is meaningful. Both may contain genuine artistic intent. Only one of them communicates anything to the viewer.
How I Rebuilt
The rebuild was uncomfortable. It required me to take routines I loved and admit they were not working as I had imagined. It required me to add words where I had relied on feeling, to be more explicit where I had been quietly hoping the audience would intuit my meaning.
For the card routine about choices, I rewrote the opening entirely. Instead of launching into the effect with a vague reference to “how we make decisions,” I told a specific story. I talked about a moment in a workshop I was running for a tech company in Vienna, where I asked the group to make a simple choice and then showed them how the framing of the question had steered their answer. I described the look on the CEO’s face when she realized her “free choice” had been gently guided. And then I said: “Let me show you what that feels like in a different context.”
From that point, every moment of the routine connected back to the theme. Not heavy-handedly — I did not lecture about cognitive bias for eight minutes. But every procedural step had a line of patter that tied it to the idea of guided choice. Every moment where the spectator made a selection was framed not as a magic procedure but as a choice that may not be as free as it feels.
The difference was immediate. At the next event, the spectator’s response was not “How did you do that?” It was “Wait — did you actually influence which card I picked?” That is a fundamentally different response. The first is about method. The second is about the theme. The first means the audience experienced a puzzle. The second means the audience experienced the idea.
Everything Communicates — Including What You Do Not Say
Brown’s principle has a corollary that is equally important: everything communicates. Not just your scripted words, but your unscripted ones. Not just your deliberate gestures, but your unconscious habits. Not just what you say, but what you do not say.
If you approach a table with nervous energy, the audience reads nervousness — and nervousness is not compatible with the experience of magic. If you handle your props carelessly, the audience reads carelessness — and carelessness suggests that what you are doing is not important. If you rush through the effect’s climax, the audience reads urgency — and urgency communicates that you do not trust the moment to hold their attention.
Every performer has communication leaks — moments where what they are broadcasting does not match what they intend. Finding these leaks requires feedback, ideally video. Watching yourself perform is painful, but it is the only reliable way to see what the audience sees. Your internal experience is too loud. It drowns out the signal. The camera does not have an internal experience. It shows you the surface, which is all the audience ever gets.
I now film myself at least once a month. Not every performance — that would be intrusive and impractical. But periodically, at a friendly event where the setup is natural, I record a set and watch it back with the volume off first, then with sound. The volume-off pass is particularly revealing. It shows you what your body is communicating without the cover of your voice. Are you making eye contact during the moments that matter? Are you still when you should be still? Are you projecting confidence or uncertainty? The body rarely lies, and the audience reads it fluently whether they know it or not.
The Responsibility Is Total
If you do not communicate it, it does not exist. This principle carries a weight that I am still learning to bear. It means there are no excuses. You cannot say “The audience did not get it” as if their failure to understand is a separate problem from your failure to communicate. They did not get it because you did not deliver it. The gap is always on your side.
But the weight is also a gift. Because if the audience’s experience is entirely a function of your communication, then you have total control over that experience. Not in the sense that you can guarantee a specific reaction — audiences are individuals with their own histories and moods and preferences. But in the sense that every tool for shaping their experience is in your hands. Your words. Your timing. Your approach. Your material. Your frame. Your presence.
You are not at the mercy of the material’s “inherent power.” There is no inherent power. There is only communicated power. And communication is a skill that can be studied, practiced, and improved.
What I Tell Myself Before Every Set
Before I walk up to a table or step onto a stage, I ask myself one question: what is the audience going to experience? Not what I hope they will experience. Not what I intend. What will they actually see, hear, and feel, based on what I am about to show them?
If the answer is “a guy doing card tricks,” I need to rethink. If the answer is “a moment where they question whether their choices were really free,” then I am on the right track — but only if every element of the performance supports that answer. The opening. The story. The framing. The script. The timing. The climax. The pause after the climax.
Communication is not one part of the performance. Communication is the performance. Everything else — the method, the technique, the props — is infrastructure. Important infrastructure, absolutely. But infrastructure that serves no purpose if what it supports does not reach the audience.
If you do not communicate it, it does not exist. I keep that sentence close. It is the most honest mirror I have found in this art.