There is a stretch of time at every live event that most performers treat as dead air. The emcee is at the podium. They are reading your introduction — ideally the one you wrote for them, though sometimes they are freelancing in ways that make you quietly clench your jaw. The audience is listening, or pretending to listen, or checking their phones for the last time before the show starts.
You are standing somewhere off to the side, waiting.
For most of my early performances, this was my least favorite part of the entire experience. I would stand backstage or in the wings or around a corner, heart rate climbing, mentally rehearsing my opening line, trying to remember whether I had loaded all my props correctly, and generally spiraling through the pre-performance anxiety that every adult-onset performer knows intimately.
The introduction was something that happened to me. I endured it. I waited through it. And then I walked on stage and encountered an audience that was, in every meaningful sense, a collection of strangers I had not studied at all.
This was a mistake I did not recognize as a mistake until I read a passage in Darwin Ortiz’s Strong Magic that reframed the introduction entirely. The passage was about spectator selection, but the underlying principle was broader. Ortiz described using the introduction as an observation window — standing off to the side and watching the audience while someone else had their attention. He treated those seconds not as dead time but as an audition. The audience was auditioning for the role of participant, and they did not even know it.
That idea changed how I use every second before I walk on.
What the Introduction Reveals
When someone introduces you, the audience’s attention is — briefly — directed away from you and toward the introducer. This is one of the rare moments in the entire performance where you can observe the audience without being observed in return. You can see them the way a director sees actors at an open call: unguarded, unperforming, displaying their natural behavior.
What you are looking for is not complicated. You are looking for engagement. How closely are people listening to the introduction? Who is leaning forward? Who is looking at the introducer with genuine curiosity? Who is already done with the evening and focused on their dessert?
The people who listen closely to the introduction are telling you something important. They are invested. They are the ones who showed up wanting the event to be good, wanting to be entertained, wanting the next thing on the program to be worth their time. These are your best potential volunteers, your most reliable laughers, and the faces you should be returning to throughout the performance for energy and connection.
The people who are not listening are also telling you something. They are not necessarily hostile or bored — they may simply be tired, distracted, or socially preoccupied. But they are not ready to engage yet. They will need to be won over during the performance, which is fine. Knowing that in advance is useful information.
The introduction audition does not tell you everything about the audience. But it tells you the single most important thing: who is already with you and who is not.
The Practical Process
I have developed a simple process for using the introduction window that takes zero additional preparation and requires nothing from the venue or the emcee.
Step one: position yourself where you can see the audience. This is sometimes the wings of a stage, sometimes a spot near the back of the room, sometimes just a few meters to the side of the podium. The exact position depends on the venue layout, but the principle is the same. You need a line of sight to at least the front third of the audience.
Step two: watch faces. Do not try to analyze the entire room. Focus on the faces you can see clearly and look for three things. Smiles — anyone who is smiling during the introduction is in a positive emotional state and likely to be receptive. Eye focus — anyone whose eyes are tracking the introducer is actively engaged. Posture — anyone who is leaning forward or sitting up straight is physically oriented toward the stage.
Step three: make mental notes. I do not try to remember everyone I see. I pick out two or three strong candidates — people whose engagement is visible and whose seat location I can identify. These become my shortlist for any volunteer selection later in the set. If I do not need a volunteer, they still serve a purpose: they are the faces I return to during the performance for energy, for connection, for the reassurance that my material is landing.
Step four: notice the cold spots. Every audience has sections that are less engaged than others. These are usually in the back corners, near the exits, or at tables close to the bar. Knowing where the cold spots are before I walk on helps me plan my stage movement and eye contact distribution. I will spend extra energy on those sections early in the set, because warming a cold spot early is much easier than trying to rescue one after it has disengaged entirely.
The entire process takes the length of the introduction — usually thirty to sixty seconds. It requires no props, no technology, no special skills. Just the discipline to look outward instead of inward during the moments when your instinct is to retreat into yourself.
The Information Nobody Else Has
Here is what struck me about this approach after I had used it a dozen times: the information you gather during the introduction is information that nobody else in the room has.
The emcee does not have it — they are focused on the podium, the text, their own delivery. The event organizer does not have it — they are worried about logistics and timing. The audience does not have it — they do not know they are being watched. You are the only person in the building who has spent thirty seconds deliberately studying the emotional temperature of the room.
This is a genuine strategic advantage. Most performers walk on stage and spend the first minute or two reading the room in real time, adjusting their energy and approach as they go. That real-time adjustment is necessary — every audience is different, and you will always need to calibrate as you perform. But starting from zero is harder than starting from a baseline. The introduction audition gives you that baseline.
I have found that even a rough baseline changes my opening dramatically. If the room was attentive and warm during the introduction, I can open with confidence and move into my material quickly. If the room was distracted or cool, I know I need to invest more time in my opening — more warmth, more humor, more direct engagement before I attempt anything that requires genuine focus from the audience.
The difference is subtle from the audience’s perspective. They do not know I adjusted. They just experience a performance that feels calibrated to them, that meets them where they are rather than where I wish they were.
What I Learned at a Tech Conference in Vienna
The event where this approach proved its value most dramatically was a tech conference in Vienna. I was doing a keynote with mentalism elements for about a hundred and fifty people, and the emcee was a company executive who was clearly reading my introduction for the first time. He stumbled over Vulpine Creations, got my background approximately right, and delivered the whole thing in about fifteen seconds flat.
But those fifteen seconds were enough for me to see something that changed my entire approach to the next twenty minutes. The audience was split. The front four rows were engaged — they were the company’s leadership team, seated together, and they were paying attention. But the back half of the room was a different story. I could see conversations, phone screens, people shifting in their seats. This was the mid-level staff who had been told to attend, and they had not yet decided whether the next twenty minutes would be worth their time.
Without the introduction audition, I would have walked on, seen a room of a hundred and fifty faces, and treated them as a single entity. I would have opened with my standard material and hoped for the best. Instead, I walked on knowing that I had two audiences: a warm front and a cool back.
So I adjusted. Instead of staying at the center of the stage and delivering to the front rows — which would have been comfortable and would have produced satisfactory reactions from the people already engaged — I moved forward and spoke directly to the back of the room. I opened with something personal and slightly self-deprecating, a brief story about the absurdity of a strategy consultant standing on a stage about to do something that has nothing to do with quarterly projections. I watched the back rows. I saw a few smiles. I kept going.
Within two minutes, the back half of the room had re-engaged. Not all of them, but enough. The energy shifted from “split room” to “unified room,” and by the time I reached my first major piece, the entire audience was tracking together. The event organizer told me afterward that the back half of the room had been difficult all day — restless through every presentation, visibly checking out during the panels. She was surprised that they stayed engaged through mine.
I did not tell her about the introduction audition. I did not explain that I had seen the split before I said my first word, or that my opening had been deliberately designed to address it. From her perspective, I had simply read the room well. From my perspective, I had read the room before I was even in it.
The Connection to Attention Control
The introduction audition is, at its core, an application of the first tool of attention control: eye contact. But it inverts the usual direction. During the performance, eye contact flows from me to the audience — I look at them to direct their attention, to create connection, to signal importance. During the introduction, the flow reverses. I am using my eyes not to direct attention but to receive information. I am the observer, not the observed.
This inversion is worth thinking about because it highlights something about attention that is easy to forget. Attention is not just a tool for controlling others. It is also a tool for understanding them. The same mechanism that allows me to direct an audience’s gaze during a routine also allows me to read their gaze before the routine begins. The skill is the same. The direction is reversed.
Performers who think of attention control only as a performance technique are missing half the picture. The other half — the receptive half, the listening half — is what turns a performer who delivers material into a performer who connects with people.
Building the Habit
The introduction audition is now so ingrained in my process that it feels strange when I do not have one. At events where I introduce myself — smaller gatherings, intimate dinners, performances where there is no emcee — I miss that observation window. I have learned to compensate by arriving early and doing my scanning during the social hour or the meal, but it is not quite the same. The introduction window is special because the audience’s attention is directed toward a single focal point, which means their faces are oriented in a predictable direction and their natural reactions are visible.
At events with a proper introduction, I now position myself with the same care I give to positioning my props. I need a sightline. I need enough distance to see a section of the room without being the obvious focus. I need to be close enough to walk on when my name is called without a long, awkward traverse from the back of the venue.
These are small logistical considerations, but they make the difference between thirty seconds of useful observation and thirty seconds of anxious waiting behind a curtain. And the difference between those two experiences is the difference between walking on stage prepared and walking on stage blind.
The Principle Underneath
The deeper lesson of the introduction audition is that performance begins before performance begins. The first word you say on stage is not the start of the show. The show starts the moment you have access to the audience, even if they do not yet have access to you.
Every performer has heard some version of “the show starts the moment you walk through the door.” This is true, but it is also vague enough to be unhelpful. The introduction audition makes it concrete. It gives you a specific action to take during a specific window of time, and that action produces specific information that improves every decision you make for the rest of the performance.
I no longer think of the introduction as dead time. I think of it as the most information-dense thirty seconds of the evening. The emcee is talking. The audience is settling. And I am doing the most important work of the night — watching the room tell me who it is before I tell it who I am.