The corporate event was in Graz, a cocktail reception in a hotel ballroom. I was doing close-up sets for small groups, moving from table to table. At one point I had gathered maybe eight people around me and was building toward a reveal — the kind of moment where you need every eye locked on the same point because the effect only lands if the audience sees the transformation happen.
I paused. The room was quiet enough. My patter was aimed correctly. My eyes were on the card I was about to turn over.
Then a waiter walked behind me carrying a tray of champagne glasses.
Eight pairs of eyes left me simultaneously. Every single person tracked the waiter as he passed. Not because they wanted champagne. Not because the waiter was interesting. But because he was moving and I was not.
By the time they looked back, I had already turned the card. I could see it on their faces — that polite but slightly confused expression of people who know something happened but did not quite catch it.
The waiter stole my moment. Not through any intention or fault of his own. He stole it simply by walking past.
The Fourth Tool
Movement is the fourth of the eight tools of attention control, and in many ways it is the most primal. Eye contact is social. Body language is communicative. Patter is linguistic. But the reflex to follow motion is something far older — wired into the nervous system at a level that predates language, culture, and social convention entirely.
The logic is evolutionary and simple. For hundreds of thousands of years, movement in the visual field meant one of two things: something you could eat, or something that might eat you. Either way, failing to track it had survival consequences. The humans who did not automatically snap their attention to movement were the ones who got surprised by predators. They did not pass on their genes.
We are the descendants of the jumpy ones. The ones whose eyes locked onto anything that moved. The ones who could not help it.
Darwin Ortiz identifies movement as one of the eight tools in Strong Magic, and what distinguishes it from the others is that it is involuntary. You can choose to ignore a verbal instruction. You can resist the pull of someone’s gaze. But you cannot stop your eyes from tracking a moving object in your visual field. The reflex fires before conscious thought has time to intervene.
This makes movement both the most powerful attention tool and the most dangerous one.
The Double Edge
The power is straightforward. If you want the audience to look at something, make it move. A card that flips over captures more attention than a card already face-up. A hand that rises slowly draws more eyes than a hand already raised. A prop traveling from one place to another becomes the most interesting thing in the visual field for as long as it is in transit.
I noticed this clearly when reviewing video of a private event in Vienna. During a card routine, there was a moment where I needed the audience to register a specific card as I placed it on the table. When I set it down quickly, the audience barely noticed. When I slowed the placement down — the card traveling in a visible arc, descending gradually — every eye in the group tracked it.
Same card. Same destination. The only difference was the speed and visibility of the movement. Slower, more visible motion created unified attention. Quick, efficient motion created almost none.
But the danger is the flip side. Movement captures attention involuntarily, which means any unplanned movement in the environment competes with you for the audience’s eyes. A waiter passing. A latecomer entering. A phone screen lighting up. A curtain swaying. Each triggers the same ancient reflex.
This is why that Graz experience was so instructive. Those eight people were interested in the trick. They were engaged. They wanted to see the reveal. And yet, when a waiter walked past — carrying champagne they did not even want — every one of them looked away. Not because they chose to. Because they could not help it.
The Stillness Discipline
Understanding movement as an attention tool reveals something equally important: the strategic power of stillness.
If movement automatically captures attention, then stillness releases it. When you stop moving, you become less interesting to the audience’s motion-tracking system. Their eyes begin to drift, looking for the next moving thing. This works against you if you are still at the wrong moment. But it works for you brilliantly if you use it to redirect attention.
The technique I developed through practice: when I want the audience’s attention to shift from me to a prop or a spectator, I go still. Not dramatic stillness — not a freeze or a pose. Just a cessation of movement. My hands stop. My body stops. I become the least interesting object from a motion-tracking perspective. And if, at that exact moment, something else moves — the spectator turning over a card, a prop that is revealed, any physical change — the audience’s attention flows from me to the moving thing without any verbal instruction.
This is attention redirection in its purest mechanical form. Just the physics of human visual attention: motion attracts, stillness releases. By going still at the right moment while something else moves, you transfer the audience’s gaze as reliably as tossing a ball.
But learning to be still on stage was one of the hardest adjustments I have made as a performer. My natural tendency, amplified by nervousness, was constant low-level motion. Shifting weight. Adjusting position. Moving my hands when they had nothing to do. Fidgeting with props between moments.
I discovered this through recording, the same method I have described in previous posts. What I saw on the footage was humbling. I was a field of constant low-grade motion — a noise machine from an attention-control perspective. Every unconscious fidget was stealing the audience’s focus from the moments that mattered.
The fix was simple in concept and brutal in execution: practice being still. Stand in front of a mirror. Hands at your sides. Weight evenly distributed. Head level. Do not move. Sixty seconds. Your body rebels. You become aware of every itch, every impulse to shift weight, every urge to touch your face. The discomfort reveals just how much unconscious movement you normally produce.
I practiced this daily in hotel rooms, five minutes before every practice session. It felt pointless. It was one of the most valuable practice investments I have ever made.
Contrast: The Amplifier
Once you have established a baseline of stillness, deliberate movement becomes enormously powerful. A single gesture from a still performer draws every eye in the room. A hand raised slowly. A step forward. A turn of the head. Against a backdrop of stillness, these movements hit with disproportionate force.
The principle is contrast. Movement captures attention on its own, but movement that follows stillness is exponentially stronger. It is the visual equivalent of someone speaking in a quiet room versus a noisy one.
I started designing routines with this principle explicitly in mind. Before any critical moment — a reveal, a transformation, a climax — I build in a beat of stillness. Not a long pause. Just a moment where everything stops. Body stills. Hands stop. Voice pauses. The visual field goes quiet.
Then the critical action happens in that silence. Against that stillness. With nothing competing.
The reactions improved measurably. Same routines. Same methods. Same reveals. The only change was the contrast between stillness and motion that framed the critical moments. The audience saw the same thing, but they saw it more clearly because nothing else was competing for their attention when it happened.
Controlling the Environment
That Graz experience taught me a lesson beyond my own movement: you need to control movement in the entire performance space.
After that event, I added a new item to my pre-show checklist. Before every performance, I identify all potential sources of ambient movement. Servers. Bartenders. Technicians. People entering through side doors. Screens with rotating slides. Decorative elements that move — hanging banners near air vents, even fountains.
I cannot always eliminate these. But I can time my critical moments to avoid them. If catering staff will be clearing tables, I schedule my most important reveals for a different moment. If there is a door people use, I position myself so it is behind the audience rather than in their peripheral vision.
At corporate events across Austria, I now ask event managers to pause table service during my set. Not every event allows this, but when I explain that small movements in the room pull attention from the presentation, most organizers understand immediately. It is the same principle that applies to their CEO’s keynote — they would not want servers walking around during the quarterly results either.
Speed as a Variable
Not all movement is equal. Fast movement captures attention more urgently, but slow movement holds it longer.
In survival terms: a fast-moving object triggers a startle response — look now, it might be a threat. A slow-moving object triggers a tracking response — follow it, assess where it is going. Both capture attention, but they create different psychological states. Fast creates alertness. Slow creates focus.
For performance, this distinction matters. When I need to capture scattered attention quickly — at the top of a routine, or after a laugh breaks focus — I use a fast, visible motion. A sharp gesture. A quick lift of a prop. Something that fires the startle response and snaps every eye to the same place.
When I want to build suspense or guide the audience through a slow reveal, I use deliberate, measured movement. A card traveling slowly through the air. A hand approaching a prop gradually. These movements hold the audience’s gaze because the tracking response does not release until the moving object reaches its destination.
The mistake I made early on was using the same speed for everything. My movements were uniformly medium-paced — neither fast enough to startle nor slow enough to mesmerize. Once I started varying speed deliberately, the quality of the audience’s attention changed noticeably.
The Isolation Principle
The most powerful application of movement as an attention tool is isolation: ensuring that only one thing moves at any given moment.
When multiple objects move simultaneously, the audience’s motion-tracking system becomes conflicted. Which one to follow? The result is divided attention. When only one thing moves, every eye in the room locks onto it. No competition. No choice.
This changed how I handle props. I used to set things down, pick things up, and adjust items while other actions were happening. Constant motion without clear direction. Now I sequence my movements. Move one thing, then stop. Move the next, then stop. Each movement gets its own moment of isolation. Each gets the full attention of the room.
The difference is dramatic in practice. A routine with isolated movements feels clean and intentional. A routine with overlapping movements feels busy and confusing, even if the patter and eye contact are perfect.
The Ancient Wiring
Something moves, and they look. Every time. Without exception. Without choice.
This is not a magic principle. It is a survival principle, older than language, older than culture, older than anything we would recognize as entertainment. It works in a corporate ballroom in Graz for the same reason it worked on the savanna two hundred thousand years ago: the hardware has not changed. Our brains still run the same software. Our eyes still scan for the moving thing in the grass.
When I remind myself of this — that I am working with reflexes that predate civilization — the tool loses its mystery and becomes engineering. I am not creating magic through personality or charisma. I am working with predictable, testable, reliable perceptual mechanisms baked into the nervous system for longer than there have been humans.
Use it deliberately, or a waiter with a tray of champagne will use it against you.