There is a moment I replay in my head whenever I am working on stage material. It happened in a rehearsal room I had rented for an afternoon in Graz — just me, a mirror, and a camera on a tripod. I was trying to adapt a close-up coins routine for a stand-up setting, and I had been at it for about an hour with diminishing returns.
I set up the camera at the eye level of a seated audience member, maybe four meters away, and recorded a run-through. Then I watched it back.
What I saw was a person standing at a table, looking down at his hands, performing for the table. The coins lived on the table surface. My hands drifted to waist height. My eyes were cast downward. My body was hunched slightly forward, oriented toward a surface that, in a stage setting, nobody could see. From the camera’s perspective, I looked like a surgeon performing an operation. The visual center of action — where things were happening, where the magic was — was hidden below the line of my arms.
That evening, in my hotel room, I re-read a section of John Graham’s Stage By Stage that I had underlined months earlier. He writes about getting the props off the table and into your hands, about progressing from holding things horizontally at waist height to displaying them vertically at chest height. “Seek to elevate your actions,” he writes.
I had read those words before. I thought I had understood them. But it was not until I watched that camera footage that I truly understood what they meant.
The Plane of Action
Close-up magic has a natural plane of action. It is roughly horizontal, roughly at the height of a table, and roughly parallel to the floor. Think about how close-up magic works physically. Cards spread on a table. Coins placed on a close-up mat. Cups set in a row on a flat surface. Even effects that happen “in the hands” tend to happen at waist height, because the performer’s hands naturally rest at the level of the table they are standing or sitting behind.
This horizontal, waist-height plane of action is perfect for close-up because the spectators are close. They are looking down at your hands from slightly above, or across at the table surface from a seated position. The angle of view is favorable. The distance is minimal. Small objects are perfectly visible.
Now change the context. Put the performer on a stage, or at the front of a room, with the audience seated in rows. The audience’s eye level is at the performer’s chest or head. The table surface — if there even is one — is below their line of sight. The natural plane of close-up magic is now below the audience’s natural gaze.
This is the fundamental physical problem of the close-up-to-stage transition, and every other physical challenge flows from it. The plane of action needs to move up. The horizontal table surface needs to be replaced by the vertical plane of the performer’s torso. Waist height needs to become chest height.
What Changes When You Raise the Plane
When I started consciously working at chest height instead of table height, every single aspect of my handling changed. Not just the position of my hands — everything.
The first thing that changed was my posture. When you work at table height, your body orientation is downward. Your shoulders round forward. Your head tilts down. Your center of gravity drops. You look like you are studying something. When you work at chest height, your posture straightens. Your shoulders open. Your head is level. You look like you are presenting something. The difference in body language is dramatic, and the audience reads it instantly.
The second thing that changed was my eye contact. At table height, you are looking at your hands. At chest height, your hands are in your peripheral vision while your eyes are free to look at the audience. This is not a small thing. It is perhaps the single most important change in the transition to stage work. Close-up performers look at their hands because the action is down there and the audience is close enough that eye contact happens naturally between moments. Stage performers need to look at the audience because the audience needs to feel connected to a person, not to a pair of hands. Working at chest height makes this possible without straining.
The third thing that changed was the visibility of the effects. Objects held at chest height are in the audience’s natural line of sight. They do not need to look down to see what is happening. They do not need to crane forward or tilt their heads. The visual information arrives at their eyes along the same line as the performer’s face, which means they can take in both the effect and the performer’s reactions simultaneously. This dual visibility — seeing the magic and seeing the magician’s response to the magic — is a core element of stage performance that is almost impossible to achieve when the action lives at waist height.
The fourth thing that changed was the size of my movements. At table height, movements are small and precise. Fingers do most of the work. Wrists contribute occasionally. Arms are mostly stationary. At chest height, the physics of holding objects higher changes the mechanics of every action. Arms are more engaged. Shoulders contribute to display gestures. The whole upper body becomes part of the performance rather than just the hands. Graham talks about using more body movements, not just hand movements, and this happens almost automatically when you raise the working height.
The Practice Problem
Here is the frustrating part: raising the plane of action sounds simple, but practicing it feels deeply unnatural if you have spent years working at table height.
When I started working chest height in my hotel room practice sessions, my first instinct was to raise my hands and keep doing exactly what I had been doing at table height. That does not work. The angles are different. The grip is different. The relationship between your hands and your body is different. Movements that felt fluid and natural at waist height felt stiff and awkward at chest height.
I spent weeks relearning routines I already knew, not because the fundamental technique had changed but because the ergonomics of performing that technique at a different height required new muscle memory. A coin display that felt effortless at table height required conscious effort at chest height because my forearm was in a different position, which changed the angle of my wrist, which changed the position of the coin on my fingers, which changed how the audience would see it.
This is tedious work. It is the kind of practice that does not feel like progress because you are re-doing things you already mastered. But it is essential. The performer who tries to transition to stage by simply raising their hands without relearning the handling at the new height will look like a close-up magician holding their hands up. It is visible. The audience may not be able to articulate what is wrong, but they sense the discomfort, the physical unease of a person performing actions at a height their body has not internalized.
The Mirror and the Camera
Two tools were indispensable during this transition, and both of them were humbling.
The mirror showed me in real time what I looked like from the front. For close-up work, I had never used a mirror because the relevant angle was from above, and a mirror gives you a front view. But for stage work, the front view is the audience’s view, and the mirror became essential. I could see immediately whether my hands were actually at chest height or had drifted back down to waist height. I could see whether my posture was open or collapsed. I could see whether the object I was displaying was actually visible or was hidden behind my forearm.
The camera was even more valuable because it showed me what I actually did rather than what I thought I did. I set the camera at the eye level of a seated audience member, approximately four meters away, and recorded full run-throughs. Then I watched them with the sound off, paying attention only to the visual composition. Was the action visible? Were my hands in the right zone? Did the overall picture look like a stage performer or like a close-up magician who had been asked to stand up?
The honest answer, for the first few weeks, was that I looked like a close-up magician who had been asked to stand up. My hands would start at chest height, then drift down within thirty seconds. My posture would open at the beginning and then collapse as I focused on technique. My eyes would stay on the audience for a moment and then lock onto my hands during any sequence that required concentration.
Breaking these habits required the same kind of deliberate practice I had used when learning close-up techniques in the first place. I recorded myself, identified the drift points, and specifically practiced maintaining height, posture, and eye contact through those moments. It was unglamorous work. It felt like regression rather than progression. But each week, the footage looked a little more like a performer and a little less like a surgeon.
The Volunteer Changes Everything
Graham makes an observation that I found counterintuitive at first but that I have since confirmed through experience: a routine that takes place in the hands at chest height can play for surprisingly large audiences, because the volunteer’s presence and reactions carry the effect to the crowd.
This is the key insight about the physical transition that goes beyond the simple instruction to raise your hands. When you have a volunteer standing next to you, the audience is not watching a pair of hands — they are watching two people having an experience. The volunteer’s face, their reactions, their body language become the primary visual channel through which the audience experiences the magic. Your hands become secondary.
This means that some effects that seem impossible to scale from close-up to stage actually scale beautifully, provided they involve a volunteer. A card trick performed solo at chest height may still be too small for the back rows. But the same card trick performed with a volunteer standing next to you, holding the card, reacting to the reveal — that can play for a room of a hundred or more. The magic is no longer in the visibility of the card. It is in the visibility of the volunteer’s reaction.
I tested this extensively at Austrian corporate events over the course of a year. I would perform the same piece in two configurations — solo at chest height, and with a volunteer. Without the volunteer, audience members beyond the fifth or sixth row reported difficulty following the visual elements. With the volunteer, even people at the very back of the room reported a powerful experience, because they were tracking the volunteer’s reactions rather than the physical details of the effect.
The implication for the physical transition is significant. You do not need to make every prop bigger or every gesture more dramatic. For effects that involve a volunteer, you need to make the volunteer visible. Position them so the audience can see their face. Give them physical actions that are readable from distance — holding something up, turning it over, opening an envelope. Design the choreography so that the dramatic moments are communicated through the volunteer’s experience, not through the fine details of your handling.
The Sixty-Centimeter Revolution
I think of the physical transition from close-up to stage as a sixty-centimeter revolution. That is roughly the distance between waist height and chest height. Sixty centimeters. The distance from the top of a table to the center of your sternum.
Everything about how your magic reads to an audience changes within that vertical distance. Your posture changes. Your eye contact changes. Your visibility changes. Your energy changes. Your relationship with the audience changes.
It is not about becoming a different performer. It is about performing at a different height and letting that height reshape everything else naturally. The character remains. The voice remains. The personality remains. But the physical instrument — your body, your hands, the space you occupy — operates in a fundamentally different way.
If you are in the process of transitioning from close-up to stage, start with this one physical adjustment before you change anything else. Take a routine you know well. Stand up. Raise your working height to chest level. And then pay attention to everything that breaks. The things that break are the things that need relearning. And that relearning is the core physical work of the transition.
Sixty centimeters. That is where the journey from close-up magician to stage performer begins.