I was watching a video of one of my performances from a corporate event in Graz. The organizer had sent me the footage, and I sat in my hotel room that evening — a Holiday Inn, laptop balanced on the desk beside a cold cup of coffee — and watched myself with the kind of critical distance that only comes from seeing yourself on a screen.
What I saw was a man trying very hard. Every gesture was big. Every line was delivered with emphasis. When the effect hit, I widened my eyes and spread my hands as if to say “Can you believe it?” I was performing at full volume the entire time, every moment pitched at maximum intensity, every beat designed to demand attention.
And the audience… was polite. They clapped. They smiled. They reacted at the right moments. But there was something missing. The reactions were appropriate rather than electric. The audience was giving me what I was asking for — applause, attention, engagement — but nothing more. Nobody gasped. Nobody grabbed the arm of the person next to them. Nobody sat in stunned silence.
I watched that video three times before I understood what was wrong. I was giving the audience no space to feel anything on their own, because I was already feeling everything for them. I was projecting astonishment, so they did not need to feel it themselves. I was telling them, through every gesture and expression, exactly how amazing this was — so they never had the chance to arrive at that conclusion independently.
I was showing them the magic instead of letting them discover it.
The Hannibal Lecter Principle
Derren Brown makes a comparison in Absolute Magic that rewired how I think about performance. He talks about Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of Hannibal Lecter. What makes Lecter terrifying is not what he does. It is what he withholds. The character is charming, calm, articulate. The danger is not displayed — it is suggested. It simmers beneath the surface. The audience can feel it, but they cannot point to it. And because they cannot point to it, because it lives in the space between what is said and what is meant, it is far more powerful than any amount of screaming or violence.
Compare that to the average villain in a lesser film. Shouting, raging, making grand speeches about destruction. The more overtly threatening the character is, the less threatening they become. Bluster invites disbelief. Restraint invites dread.
Brown argues that the same principle applies to magic. If you overstate your abilities, the audience questions them. If you understate them and let the audience sense something deeper beneath the surface, they will do the imaginative work themselves. And whatever the audience imagines will always be more powerful than whatever you can demonstrate.
This is the principle of withheld presence: the grandeur of what you do should be felt, not seen. Held back, not pushed forward.
What Withholding Looks Like in Practice
When I first tried to apply this, I got it wrong. I thought withholding meant being passive. Being quiet. Standing still and letting the tricks speak for themselves. I performed at a private event in Vienna with what I thought was mysterious restraint, and the feedback from the organizer was that I seemed disengaged. “It felt like you didn’t want to be there,” she said.
That was the wrong lesson from the right principle. Withholding is not about doing less. It is about doing less visibly. The energy is still there — it is just beneath the surface. You are fully present, fully engaged, fully in control. But you are not advertising it.
The practical difference looks like this. In the old approach, when an effect reached its climax, I would lean forward, gesture dramatically, and say something like “Look — it’s changed.” In the new approach, I do the same effect, but at the climax, I pause. I look at the changed card, or the impossible object, or whatever the final condition is. I look at it as if I am seeing it for the first time too. I let a beat of silence hang. Then I look up at the spectator and say nothing.
The spectator looks at the effect. Looks at me. Processes. And then the reaction comes — not because I prompted it, but because they arrived at it themselves. The reaction is theirs, not mine. And because it is theirs, it goes deeper.
This is a tiny adjustment. The difference between saying “Look!” and saying nothing. Between leaning forward and holding still. Between performing the reaction and allowing it to emerge. But the impact is enormous, because it shifts the audience from passive receivers to active participants. They are not watching someone be amazed. They are being amazed.
The Silence After the Effect
One of the hardest things I have learned is to be comfortable with silence. Not the dramatic pause before an effect — that is a well-known tool. I mean the silence after the effect. The moment when the magic has happened and the audience is processing.
My instinct, for years, was to fill that silence. To say something clever. To transition immediately to the next beat. To keep the energy moving. The silence felt dangerous, like a vacuum that needed to be filled before it swallowed the performance whole.
But that silence is where the magic actually lives. The silence after the effect is the moment when the spectator’s rational mind is trying to catch up with what they just experienced. It is the moment when impossibility is sinking in. It is the moment when the experience transitions from “I just saw something” to “I cannot explain what I just saw.” Filling that silence with patter is like turning on the lights in a cinema during the most emotional scene. The spell breaks. The processing stops. The audience returns to the comfortable, managed experience of watching a performance.
I had to train myself to stand in that silence. To hold eye contact with the spectator and let the moment exist. To resist every instinct that told me to move on. The first few times, it felt like standing on the edge of a cliff. The silence seemed to stretch forever. But what I discovered was that the audience does not experience that silence as empty. They experience it as full. Full of the thing that just happened. Full of their own reaction forming. Full of the shared understanding that something extraordinary just occurred.
Now, the silence after the effect is my favorite part of performing. It is the moment where I feel most connected to the audience, because we are both sitting in the same experience, and neither of us is performing.
The Knowing Look
There is a specific tool I have developed that I think of as the knowing look. It is not a technique I read about anywhere — it emerged from experimenting with withheld presence over many performances.
After an effect lands, and after the silence, I sometimes give the spectator a very slight look. Not a grin. Not a wink. Not a conspiratorial smirk. Just a look that says, very quietly: I know what just happened. And now you do too.
This look communicates something that no words can achieve. It suggests shared secret knowledge. It implies that what just happened was not a trick but a glimpse of something real. It treats the spectator not as someone who was fooled but as someone who was let in on something rare.
The look has to be genuine. If it is performed — if it is an act — it reads as smugness. If it comes from a real place of shared experience, it reads as connection. The difference is internal. When I give the knowing look, I am genuinely in the moment with the spectator. I am thinking, not “I fooled you,” but “We both just experienced something extraordinary.” And that internal state communicates itself through the look.
This is what Brown means when he writes that what you do not do communicates more than what you do. The knowing look says nothing. It explains nothing. It does not draw attention to itself. But it speaks volumes.
The Performer as Conduit, Not Source
There is a deeper philosophical layer here that took me a long time to understand. When a magician performs at full volume — big gestures, dramatic declarations, visible effort to impress — the implicit message is: “I am doing this. I am the source of the magic. Pay attention to me.” The performer is the center, and the magic radiates outward from them.
When a performer withholds, the implicit message is different. It is: “Something is happening here. I am as close to it as you are. We are both witnessing this.” The performer becomes a conduit rather than a source. A connection point between the audience and something larger.
This shift in framing changes everything about how the audience processes the experience. When the performer is the source, the audience evaluates the performer. How skilled is he? How clever? How did he do that? The performer’s ego is on stage, and the audience is judging it.
When the performer is a conduit, the audience evaluates the experience. What just happened? How is that possible? What does this mean about what I thought I knew? The performer’s ego recedes, and the experience expands to fill the space.
This is not about pretending to have supernatural powers. I am not suggesting you should claim to channel mysterious forces. The distinction is subtler than that. It is about whether your performance style positions you as someone who does clever things or as someone through whom extraordinary things seem to happen. The first creates admiration. The second creates wonder. And wonder is what we are after.
The Economy of Gestures
I started auditing my gestures after watching that hotel room video. I counted every hand movement, every facial expression, every postural shift in a three-minute routine. The number was staggering. I was moving constantly, expressing constantly, signaling constantly. My body was a firehose of information, spraying the audience with cues about how to feel and where to look and what to think.
I cut the gestures by roughly two-thirds. Where I used to make three hand movements during a phase, I now make one. Where I used to narrate every moment, I now narrate every third moment. Where I used to shift my weight and angle my body for every beat, I now find a position and hold it.
The result is that when I do move, it matters. When I do speak, it carries weight. When I do gesture, the audience follows it because it is the only movement in a field of stillness. Each gesture becomes a signal instead of noise. Each word becomes important because it is surrounded by silence.
This is the practical manifestation of withheld presence. It is not about being still. It is about being selective. Choosing your moments of expression so that each one lands with full force, rather than spreading your energy so thin that nothing lands at all.
The Hardest Part
The hardest part of withheld presence is trusting the audience. Trusting that they will react without being prompted. Trusting that the silence will not swallow the performance. Trusting that less, in this case, really is more.
This trust is difficult to develop because it goes against every instinct a nervous performer has. When you are on stage — especially when you are an adult who came to magic late, as I did, without a lifetime of performing confidence to lean on — every silent moment feels like a void. Every unreacted beat feels like a failure. The temptation to fill, to push, to perform harder is almost irresistible.
But the truth I have learned, performance after performance, is that the audience does not need to be managed into their reactions. They need to be allowed into them. The magic is already doing the work. The impossible thing has already happened. Your job is not to convince them it was amazing. Your job is to get out of the way so they can feel it.
Hold back. Trust the silence. Let the magic speak. The less you do, the more they feel. And what they feel on their own will always be more powerful than anything you could have performed for them.