Let me tell you about a dinner in Vienna that changed how I think about performing.
It was a private event. Twenty people around a long table, good wine, the kind of atmosphere where conversation flows easily and nobody is looking at their phone. I was there partly as a guest and partly because the host knew about my involvement with Vulpine Creations and had mentioned to a few people that I “do interesting things.”
That was all. No formal introduction. No “Felix is going to perform for us later.” Just a vague mention, dropped casually into conversation earlier in the evening, that one of the guests did something unusual.
For the first hour, I did absolutely nothing. I ate. I talked. I asked questions about people’s work and families. I was, in every observable way, just another guest at the table. But I noticed something happening around me. People were glancing in my direction. Conversations would pause when I reached for my wine glass, as if someone expected something to appear. A woman across the table leaned over to her husband and whispered something while looking at me.
The anticipation was building. Not because I was building it — I was eating risotto — but because the absence of performance was creating its own kind of pressure. The audience knew something was supposed to happen. They did not know when. And the not-knowing was doing work that no opening line or introduction could ever do.
Eventually, the host leaned over and said, “Felix, you have to show them something. They’re dying.”
I hesitated. “I don’t know… I didn’t really prepare anything.”
“Come on. Just one thing.”
I paused. Looked around the table. Fifteen pairs of eyes were locked on me.
“All right. One thing.”
What followed was a simple mentalism piece — something I had performed hundreds of times. But the reaction was wildly disproportionate to the effect. People pushed their chairs back from the table. Someone said a word I cannot print. The woman who had been whispering grabbed her husband’s arm. The entire table erupted.
The effect was the same effect I had performed at corporate events to polite applause. The method was identical. But the experience was incomparably more powerful. And the difference was not in what I did. It was in everything that happened before I did it.
The Eager Performer Problem
Most magicians are eager. Pathologically eager. We have spent hours learning effects, polishing routines, and developing material, and we want to share it. We walk into a room crackling with energy, barely able to contain our excitement about the card trick we have been rehearsing. We approach a group and say, “Hey, do you want to see something?” or “Can I show you a quick trick?” or “I do magic — want to see?”
I know this eagerness intimately because I lived it for years. The first time I met Adam Wilber at that Xcite Festival event in London, I was the kind of person who would show you a card trick within five minutes of meeting you whether you asked for it or not. The compulsion to demonstrate was almost physical. I had this thing I could do, and I needed people to see it.
The problem with eagerness is that it places the performer in a position of low status. When you offer to perform, you are essentially asking for permission. You are saying: “I have something. Will you accept it?” This puts the audience in the role of gatekeeper. They can say yes or no. They are doing you a favor by watching. The dynamic is skewed from the start, and no amount of skill can fully correct it.
Derren Brown describes this dynamic in Absolute Magic with characteristic directness. His approach to close-up performance involved never asking anyone if they wanted to see a trick. Instead, he would drop intriguing hints into conversation and allow curiosity to build. He would manipulate the situation so that the audience asked him. He would feign reluctance. And when he finally “gave in” and performed, the audience was not doing him a favor — he was doing them one.
The reversal is total. And the effect on the audience’s receptivity is profound.
The Psychology of Wanting
There is a well-documented principle in psychology that people value things more when they have to work to obtain them. Scarcity increases perceived value. Difficulty of access increases desire. The restaurant with a three-month waiting list is perceived as better than the identical restaurant with open tables, regardless of the actual quality of the food.
This principle applies directly to performance. When magic is freely offered — “Want to see a trick?” — it has the perceived value of something freely available. Easy to get, easy to dismiss. But when magic is withheld — when the audience has to ask, has to wait, has to persuade the performer to share — the perceived value skyrockets. Before a single effect has been performed, the audience has already invested in the experience. They asked for it. They waited for it. They wanted it. And that investment primes them to receive it with an intensity that no freely offered performance can match.
This is not manipulation in any sinister sense. It is an understanding of human psychology applied to the structure of a performance encounter. The audience genuinely enjoys the experience more when they feel they earned it. The anticipation is part of the pleasure. The asking is part of the story they will tell later. “He didn’t want to do anything, but we made him, and then he absolutely destroyed us.”
That story — the story of reluctant genius provoked into action — is infinitely more compelling than “the magician came over and did some tricks.”
How Reluctance Creates Prestige
Darwin Ortiz writes extensively about prestige — the perceived authority and importance of the performer. Prestige, he argues, is the single most effective defense against audience challenges, disruptions, and dismissiveness. When the audience perceives you as important, they treat you and your material with respect. When they perceive you as unimportant, they treat you like background entertainment.
Reluctance is one of the most efficient prestige-builders available. Consider what reluctance communicates: I have something valuable. I do not need to share it. I am not desperate for your attention or approval. If I perform, it will be because you convinced me, not because I need to prove myself.
Every one of those messages raises the performer’s status. The reluctant performer is someone of consequence. Someone whose time and talent are valuable. Someone who does not perform for just anyone. The audience perceives this, and their attitude shifts accordingly. They sit up straighter. They pay closer attention. They respond more strongly. Because the thing they are watching has been framed, through reluctance alone, as rare and precious.
Compare this to the eager performer who bounds up to a table and says “I’m the magician tonight — want to see something?” That performer has communicated: I am here to serve you. My job is to entertain you. My status is below yours. The audience’s response is correspondingly casual. They will watch, sure. But they will watch the way they watch a waiter describe the specials — politely, with half their attention, already thinking about what comes next.
The Mechanics of Feigned Reluctance
Reluctance must be feigned, not real. If you are genuinely reluctant to perform, the audience will sense it and interpret it as insecurity. The reluctance I am describing is a performance choice — a deliberate structuring of the pre-performance dynamic that builds anticipation and raises status.
Here is how I do it in practice.
At a dinner or social event, I arrive as a guest. I do not mention magic. I do not carry visible props. I dress like everyone else. I engage in conversation about whatever the group is discussing. If someone mentions that I “do magic” or am involved in Vulpine Creations, I downplay it. “It’s a hobby that got a bit out of hand.” “I dabble.” “It’s hard to explain.”
Each of these responses does two things simultaneously. First, it avoids confirming the “magician” category that would trigger the audience’s preconceptions. Second, it introduces mystery. What does he mean, it’s hard to explain? What kind of hobby gets out of hand? The audience’s curiosity is activated, but without a clear target. They know something is there, but they do not know what. The ambiguity is irresistible.
As the evening progresses, I might drop a very small hint. Nothing overt. A comment about human psychology. A remark about how predictable people’s choices are. A moment where I guess what someone is about to say before they say it, then brush it off as coincidence. These are not tricks. They are suggestions — tiny demonstrations of perception that are easily explained but subtly unsettling.
By now, the table is primed. Someone will eventually say the magic words: “Come on, show us something.” And when they do, I resist.
“Nah, I don’t want to make it weird.”
“It’s better if I don’t.”
“Maybe later.”
Each refusal increases the pressure. Each “no” makes the eventual “yes” more valuable. The audience is now actively advocating for the performance. They want it. They are asking for it. And when I finally relent — “Okay, fine, but just one thing” — the table has been set for an experience that is orders of magnitude more powerful than anything I could have created by walking up and offering.
The Keynote Version
This dynamic works differently in formal performance settings, but the principle is the same. At a corporate event or conference, I cannot spend an hour building reluctance over dinner. But I can structure my introduction and opening to create a version of the same effect.
My introduction — which I write myself and hand to the emcee — describes me primarily as a consultant and speaker. The mention of mentalism or magic comes late, almost as an afterthought. By the time I walk on stage, the audience is expecting a business keynote, not a magic show. And when the first extraordinary thing happens, it arrives not as entertainment delivered on schedule, but as something unexpected that emerged from what appeared to be a standard presentation.
That structural surprise — the audience discovering that what they thought was a keynote is actually something else entirely — creates its own version of the reluctance dynamic. I did not offer magic. It appeared. The audience did not ask for it. It happened. And the sense that they are experiencing something unplanned and genuine, rather than something scheduled and expected, amplifies the impact enormously.
The Risk
The risk of feigned reluctance is that you overplay it and become genuinely annoying. If the audience asks three times and you say no three times, the fourth refusal will read as rudeness rather than mystique. The reluctance has to be calibrated. Enough resistance to build desire, but not so much that desire turns to irritation.
My rule of thumb is simple: make them ask twice. The first ask gets a gentle deflection. The second ask gets a moment of apparent internal deliberation — visible, readable, as if I am genuinely deciding whether to do this — followed by a yielding. “Okay. But this stays between us.”
That last line — “this stays between us” — does yet another layer of work. It creates the feeling of a private moment, a secret shared. Even in a room of twenty people, that framing transforms the performance from a public show into a personal revelation. And personal revelations, by their nature, are treated with a reverence that public shows rarely achieve.
What I Learned From Dinner Parties
Some of my most powerful performing experiences have happened at dinner tables where I was not booked, not scheduled, not introduced. They happened in the spaces where the boundary between guest and performer was blurred, where the audience’s desire for the experience was built through patience and restraint rather than announcement and eagerness.
These experiences taught me something that no book could have taught me with the same force: the setup is more important than the trick. The context in which magic occurs shapes the experience of magic more profoundly than the content of the magic itself. A simple effect, delivered into an atmosphere of anticipation and desire, will outperform a complex effect delivered into an atmosphere of polite obligation every single time.
Reluctance is not laziness. It is not avoidance. It is architecture. It is the deliberate construction of a psychological environment in which magic can land with maximum force. And it works because it aligns with a fundamental truth about human nature: we want most what we cannot easily have.
Stop offering. Start hinting. Let them come to you. And when they do — when the table is leaning in, when the eyes are bright, when someone finally says “Come on, you have to show us” — that is the moment. Not a moment sooner.
The magic that follows will feel different. Not because you changed the trick. Because you changed everything that surrounded it.