There is a structural technique in show construction that, once you see it, you cannot unsee it. You notice it in television writing, in stand-up comedy, in film editing, and in the best stage magic shows you have ever watched. The technique is intertwining — beginning something, deliberately leaving it unresolved, performing something else, and then returning to the original thread to complete it.
John Graham calls a version of this “building bookends” in Stage By Stage, and the concept extends far beyond his specific formulation. At its core, intertwining is the art of creating narrative threads that weave through your show rather than stacking effects one after another in a linear sequence.
The first time I tried it, I was terrified the audience would lose the thread. They did not. In fact, they were more engaged precisely because the thread was left hanging.
The Default Mode: Trick, Reset, Trick
For most of my early performing life, my show structure was simple and sequential. I performed effect one. I acknowledged the reaction. I transitioned to effect two. I performed effect two. I acknowledged the reaction. I transitioned to effect three. And so on.
This structure is not wrong. It is the default mode of most magic shows, and it can be effective. Clean, logical, easy to follow. Each piece has a beginning, middle, and end. The audience knows when one thing is over and another is beginning.
But this structure has a hidden weakness: it creates a series of emotional peaks and valleys that are disconnected from each other. Each effect generates its own arc of tension and release, but the arcs do not connect. When one piece ends and another begins, there is a moment of reset — a tiny gap where the audience’s emotional investment drops to zero before building again from scratch.
Over the course of a forty-five-minute show, these resets accumulate. The audience is not bored, exactly, but they are never quite as invested as they could be, because every few minutes they experience a micro-disconnection as one thread ends and a new one starts.
Intertwining eliminates those resets. It creates continuous threads of engagement that span multiple effects, so the audience is always carrying forward some piece of unresolved narrative tension.
The First Thread
Here is how I first discovered intertwining in practice, rather than in theory.
I was performing at a corporate event in Salzburg — one of those evening gala situations where I had been booked through Vulpine Creations for a thirty-minute stage set. My show at that point had six pieces, performed sequentially, with scripted transitions between them.
During one particular performance, something went slightly wrong with my second piece. A prop was not where it needed to be, and I needed a moment to recover. Instead of fumbling through the recovery in real time, I made a split-second decision: I set the unfinished second piece aside, told the audience I would come back to it, and moved on to my third piece.
It was a survival move, not an artistic choice. But something interesting happened. The audience was visibly more engaged during the third piece than they usually were. And when I returned to the unfinished second piece after the third piece concluded, the payoff landed harder than it had ever landed before.
After the show, I thought about why this had happened. And the answer was obvious once I saw it: the unresolved thread created anticipation. While the audience was watching the third piece, part of their attention was still holding the unfinished second piece. They were carrying two threads simultaneously. And the resolution of the delayed thread felt more satisfying because they had been waiting for it.
That accidental discovery became a deliberate structural choice.
The Mechanics of a Woven Show
Intertwining is not complicated in principle, but it requires careful planning in execution. Here is the basic structure.
You begin a piece — call it Thread A. You advance Thread A to a point of tension or uncertainty, but before the climax, you pause. You set the Thread A prop aside visibly. You address the audience: “We will come back to that in a moment.” Then you perform Thread B in its entirety, from beginning to climax. After the reaction to Thread B, you return to Thread A and bring it to its resolution.
The simplest version has two threads. Thread A creates an open loop. Thread B provides a complete experience while the loop remains open. Thread A resolves the loop. Two threads, one intertwine.
The more advanced version weaves three or more threads. Thread A opens a loop. Thread B opens a second loop. Thread C resolves Thread A’s loop. Thread D resolves Thread B’s loop. Or Thread A opens, Thread B is complete, Thread C opens, Thread A resolves, Thread D is complete, Thread C resolves. The combinations are numerous, and the right choice depends on the emotional arcs of your specific pieces.
Graham describes a related concept he calls “the leave behind” — where a prop used in an early routine is left on stage and then used again later, apparently spontaneously. This is a specific application of the intertwining principle: the first appearance of the prop opens a loop (even if the audience does not consciously register it), and the second appearance resolves it with a sense of organic surprise.
What the Audience Experiences
The reason intertwining works is rooted in how people process narrative. Psychologists call the phenomenon the Zeigarnik effect — the tendency for incomplete tasks to occupy more mental space than completed ones. An unresolved narrative thread creates a mild but persistent form of cognitive tension. The mind wants closure. It holds the open thread in a state of active processing, waiting for resolution.
When you deliberately leave a thread unresolved during a magic show, you are leveraging this tendency. The audience is not consciously thinking about the unfinished piece — they are engaged with whatever you are currently doing — but the unfinished thread is operating in the background of their attention. It creates a subtle undercurrent of anticipation that makes everything feel more connected, more structured, more intentional.
When the thread finally resolves, the audience experiences not just the satisfaction of the individual effect, but the additional satisfaction of narrative closure. The delayed resolution feels earned in a way that an immediate resolution does not. The audience has invested more attentional energy in the piece, and the payoff rewards that investment.
This is why the accidental intertwine at the Salzburg show worked so well. The audience had been carrying the unresolved second piece for the entire duration of the third piece. By the time I returned to it, they had been anticipating the resolution for several minutes. The climax landed harder because the anticipation had been building longer.
The Scripting Challenge
The practical challenge of intertwining is scripting the transitions. When you pause Thread A and move to Thread B, you need a transition that accomplishes several things simultaneously. It needs to clearly communicate that Thread A is paused, not abandoned. It needs to create a reason for the pause that feels organic rather than arbitrary. It needs to set up Thread B in a way that maintains energy. And it needs to be brief enough that it does not create dead time.
I have found that the most effective transitions are ones that acknowledge the pause with a touch of humor or intrigue. Something that tells the audience: this is deliberate, and the payoff will be worth the wait.
The return transition — from Thread B back to Thread A — is equally important. You need to re-establish the state of Thread A quickly and cleanly, reminding the audience where you left off without making them feel like they missed something. The best return transitions reference something specific from the Thread A setup, creating a callback that snaps the audience’s attention back to the open loop.
Graham’s point about scripting is critical here. He writes that our scripts are mightier than our sleights, and nowhere is this more true than in intertwined show structures. The words that pause a thread, the words that return to a thread, and the words that resolve a thread are doing structural work that is invisible to the audience but essential to the experience. You cannot wing these transitions. They must be written, rehearsed, and refined through live performance.
The Prop Management Problem
One practical consideration that nobody mentions until you try intertwining for the first time: where do you put the Thread A props while you are performing Thread B?
In close-up magic, this is relatively simple. You set something down on the table and the audience can see it sitting there, unresolved, creating visual tension. In stage magic, it is more complex. A prop left on a table at the side of the stage might be forgotten by the audience. A prop held by a volunteer who is standing on stage doing nothing while you perform a completely different piece is awkward.
I experimented with several approaches. The one that works best for my show is to leave the Thread A prop in a visible, elevated position — on a table at center stage, or in the hands of a volunteer who remains seated in the front row. The key is visibility. If the audience cannot see the unresolved Thread A element, the Zeigarnik effect weakens because there is no visual reminder of the open loop.
Graham writes about keeping consistency in your props — using the same stool, the same marker, throughout the show. This principle extends to intertwined structures. When you return to Thread A, the prop needs to be exactly where and how you left it. Any change in the state of the Thread A setup during the Thread B performance would create confusion or suspicion. The audience needs to perceive that Thread A has been frozen in place, patiently waiting for its resolution.
Building Confidence in the Structure
The hardest part of implementing intertwining was trusting that it would work. My instinct, especially during the transition from close-up to stage, was to finish each piece before starting the next. Leaving something unresolved felt risky. What if the audience forgot? What if the energy dropped during the transition? What if the return felt awkward rather than satisfying?
These fears turned out to be unfounded. The audience never forgot. Not once, in dozens of performances using intertwined structures, has an audience failed to track an open thread. This makes sense when you think about it — we are a species that evolved to track narrative. We binge-watch television shows that leave threads hanging for entire seasons. We remember subplots in novels across hundreds of pages. A five-minute delay in a magic show is nothing compared to the narrative tracking we do every day.
The energy did not drop during transitions, either, as long as the transitions were scripted and rehearsed. In fact, the energy often increased at transition points because the audience sensed that something structural was happening — that the show had a larger architecture than a simple sequence of effects.
And the returns — far from being awkward — became some of the strongest moments in my show. The return to an unresolved thread carries built-in momentum. The audience has been waiting for it. When you say “Now, let us go back to…” the room leans forward. There is an anticipatory energy in the room that you get for free, simply because you had the structural foresight to create an open loop.
Intertwining as a Close-Up-to-Stage Bridge
Intertwining is particularly valuable during the transition from close-up to stage because it solves a problem that many transitioning performers face: the show feels like a collection of tricks rather than a unified experience.
In close-up, this is less of an issue. Each interaction is relatively brief, and the social context of performing at a dinner table or a cocktail reception provides natural connective tissue between pieces. But on stage, where the audience is watching a continuous forty-five-minute performance, the lack of structural connection between pieces becomes glaring. The show feels episodic. Effect, reset, effect, reset. The audience starts to mentally compartmentalize each piece rather than experiencing the show as a whole.
Intertwining creates structural connections that make the show feel cohesive. When threads weave through multiple pieces, the audience perceives the show as a single integrated experience rather than a collection of independent performances. The show has architecture. It has forward motion. It has the feeling of going somewhere rather than just cycling through a list.
For me, implementing intertwining was one of the most significant structural upgrades I made during the close-up-to-stage transition. It transformed my show from a set list into a narrative. And the audience response confirmed the transformation — people began commenting not just on individual pieces, but on the show as a whole. “The way everything connected” became a recurring theme in post-show feedback.
Start Simple
If you are new to intertwining, start with a single two-thread weave. Choose a piece that has a natural pause point before its climax — a moment where you can credibly set it aside. Choose a second piece that works as a complete standalone experience. Script the transitions in and out. Rehearse them until they feel natural. Then perform the intertwined structure live, paying close attention to how the audience responds during the Thread B performance and during the Thread A return.
The first time you see an audience light up when you return to the unresolved thread, you will understand why this technique exists. They were waiting. They were holding the thread. And the resolution feels like a gift — not just a magic trick, but the satisfying conclusion of a story they have been following.
Intertwining takes your show from a list of things you do to a journey you take together.