There is a specific moment in every magic show where the performer is at their most vulnerable. It is not the moment of the effect — by then, rehearsal and preparation carry you. It is not the opening — adrenaline and the audience’s fresh goodwill carry you there. The moment of maximum vulnerability is the transition. The five to fifteen seconds between the climax of one piece and the beginning of the next.
In those seconds, the dramatic arc collapses. The effect is over. The audience is still processing. And you — the performer — must do something. Set down one prop. Pick up another. Reset your position. Reset the audience’s expectations. Bridge two completely different pieces of material without the show feeling like it hit a wall.
I used to dread these moments. Now they are my favorite part of the show. That change did not happen quickly, and it did not happen by accident. It happened because I stopped treating transitions as the spaces between performances and started treating them as performances themselves.
The Dead Zone
I want to describe what a bad transition looks like, because I performed hundreds of them before I learned to do better.
A bad transition looks like this: the climax lands, the audience applauds, and then everything stops. The performer turns away from the audience, walks to the table, sets down the props from the completed piece, picks up the props for the next piece, turns back to the audience, and begins the new routine. Maybe there is a sentence in there somewhere — “Now I would like to show you something else” or “For my next piece…” — but the sentence is filler. It carries no entertainment value. It exists only to fill silence while housekeeping happens.
During those seconds, the audience’s emotional investment drops to near zero. The applause from the previous piece fades into nothing. The energy in the room dips. People shift in their seats, glance at their phones, lean over to whisper to their neighbor. By the time the next piece begins, the performer has to rebuild engagement from a standing start.
I know this pattern intimately because it was my default for a long time. My early stage shows were constructed as a series of strong individual pieces separated by these dead zones. Each piece had been polished through close-up performing and adapted for stage. Each piece worked on its own terms. But the show as a whole felt uneven, like a playlist of good songs separated by stretches of static.
When I watched my first recorded stage performance — really watched it, with a notebook, frame by frame — the transitions were the most painful thing to see. Not because anything went wrong. But because nothing happened. I was just moving props around. And the audience was just waiting.
The Insight That Changed Everything
John Graham writes about finding the flow — all moments should blend into one seamless whole. Transitions, he insists, should not feel like “here is a trick, okay that one is done.” The entire show should feel like a continuous experience. There is no time, he writes, to vacillate, hesitate, or complicate.
That principle sounds obvious when you read it on the page. In practice, it requires a fundamental shift in how you think about show construction. You have to stop thinking of your show as a sequence of effects separated by transitions and start thinking of it as a continuous performance that happens to include effects.
The difference is not semantic. It changes what you rehearse, what you script, and where you allocate your creative energy.
Under the old model, my creative energy went almost entirely into the effects. The transitions were afterthoughts — functional connective tissue that existed to get me from one impressive thing to the next. Under the new model, the transitions receive the same creative attention as the effects. They are scripted, rehearsed, refined through live performance, and treated as entertainment in their own right.
What Alive Transitions Sound Like
The first change I made was to write out every transition word for word. Not approximately. Not with a general direction. Every sentence that bridges one piece to the next was scripted, memorized, and refined through dozens of performances.
Here is what I discovered through the scripting process: the best transitions are not about the logistics of moving between pieces. They are about the audience’s experience.
A logistics transition sounds like this: “Let me set this aside. Now, I want to show you something I have been working on.”
An experience transition sounds like this: a personal aside about how the next piece came to exist. A callback to something that happened earlier. A question directed at the audience. A brief anecdote from my week. A comedic observation about something the volunteer just did. Anything that gives the audience something to engage with while the physical reset happens underneath.
The physical reset still happens. Props still move. But the audience is not watching the props. They are listening to me say something interesting, or laughing at something unexpected, or leaning in because I have asked them a question they want to answer. The logistics happen beneath the entertainment, like stagehands working in the dark while the audience watches the spotlight.
Graham talks about connecting between tricks by being in the present moment — asking where people are from, commenting on the room, responding to what just happened. The transitions become interpersonal moments rather than logistical ones. And interpersonal moments are inherently engaging, because people are interested in people.
What Alive Transitions Look Like
Scripting covers the audio. But transitions have a visual dimension that matters just as much.
The visual problem with most transitions is that the performer breaks their performance posture. They turn their back. They look down at the table. They fumble with props. Their body language broadcasts: the show is paused. I am doing housekeeping. Please wait.
The fix is to maintain performance posture through the transition. Face the audience. Keep your body open. Make eye contact while you speak. Handle props without looking at them, using spatial memory and rehearsed movements to manage the physical logistics while your attention stays on the room.
This requires dedicated practice. Not practice of the effects that surround the transitions. Practice of the transitions themselves, as discrete physical routines. I rehearse my transitions in hotel rooms with the same care I give my effects. Where does the completed prop go? Where does the next prop come from? Can I execute these movements without looking? Can I do them with my body oriented toward the audience? Can I do them while talking?
When I finally achieved this — when the transitions became as physically rehearsed as the effects — the feedback from audiences changed. People stopped commenting on individual pieces and started commenting on the flow. “The whole show just moved,” someone told me after a corporate event in Vienna. “I could not tell where one thing ended and the next began.” That is the goal. The show becomes continuous.
Transitions as Character Moments
There is a deeper function to transitions that goes beyond continuity. Transitions are the moments where the audience sees the performer rather than the performance. During an effect, they are watching magic happen. During a transition, they are watching a person.
This makes transitions the most important moments for communicating your personality, your humanity, and your character. It is in the spaces between effects that the audience decides whether they like you. Whether they trust you. Whether they would want to have a conversation with you after the show. The effects impress them. The transitions connect them.
A well-scripted transition might include a personal observation about how you discovered the next piece. A self-deprecating comment about your practice habits — I have a recurring line about how many hotel room mirrors have witnessed my failures, and it always gets a warm laugh because the audience can picture it. A genuine moment of connection with a volunteer who just helped you, where you drop the performer register for a beat and simply say something real to another human being.
I have come to think of transitions as the mortar between bricks. The bricks — the effects — are what the audience remembers when they describe the show afterward. But the mortar holds the structure together. Without it, the bricks are just a pile of impressive but disconnected objects. With it, they form something cohesive. Something that stands.
The Comedy Goldmine
I did not expect this, but transitions turned out to be where a disproportionate amount of comedy lives.
The reason is structural. During an effect, the audience is engaged with the impossibility. Their attention is on the magic. Comedy during an effect risks undercutting the magical moment — a concern Graham raises explicitly, warning never to let a laugh come at the expense of the mystery.
But during a transition, there is no magical moment to protect. The effect is over. The audience is in a relaxed, receptive state. They have just experienced something impressive, their defenses are down, and they are primed to laugh. A well-placed comedic observation during a transition lands harder than the same observation during an effect, because there is no competing stimulus pulling attention elsewhere.
Many of my best laugh lines now live in transitions. A callback to a volunteer’s reaction from two pieces ago. A self-aware comment about the obvious prop switch happening in plain sight. A running gag that exists only in the spaces between effects, creating a through-line that the audience tracks across the show and that pays off more richly each time it recurs.
Graham distinguishes between jokes, lines, and bits in his comedy framework. Many of the best lines — the organic, apparently spontaneous comments that feel like they arose naturally in the moment — were born during transitions. The performer is most visibly present during a transition, most visibly human, most visibly responsive to the room. These are the conditions under which genuine humor emerges. And once that humor emerges organically in a live show, you can capture it, refine it, and install it permanently in the scripted transition where it was born.
Over time, my transitions have become repositories of accumulated comedic discoveries. What started as an improvised aside during a corporate event in Graz becomes a permanent line. What began as a spontaneous reaction to a volunteer became a scripted beat that now works every time. The transitions grow richer with every performance because the conditions for comedy are built into their DNA.
The Close-Up-to-Stage Amplification
Transitions matter more on stage than in close-up, and the reason is time.
In a close-up set, each piece is brief and the transitions between them are correspondingly short. A close-up performer might transition with nothing more than a pause and a shift of attention. The audience accepts this because the entire interaction is compact and intimate.
On stage, the transitions are physically longer. Walking to a table. Managing larger props. Repositioning on stage. Waiting for a volunteer to return to their seat. These actions take real time — ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty seconds. And the audience has all of that time to notice what is happening. A five-second dead zone in a close-up set is barely perceptible. A fifteen-second dead zone on stage is an eternity. The audience has time to disengage, check their phones, lose the thread. By the time you start your next piece, you are performing for a room that has mentally left the building.
This amplification means the close-up performer transitioning to stage must upgrade their transitions significantly. What worked at a dinner table — a brief pause, a simple “let me show you something else” — does not work from a stage. The distances are greater, the prop management more complex, and the audience’s threshold for dead time much lower.
I learned this the hard way. My first stage shows had close-up transitions — minimal, logistics-focused, functional. They worked in close-up because the intimacy of the setting provided its own connective tissue. On stage, they created dead zones that punctured the show’s momentum and forced me to rebuild engagement from scratch at the start of every new piece.
The upgrade took months. I scripted every transition. I rehearsed the physical logistics until I could execute them without looking. I developed content — comedic, personal, interactive — for each transition point. I timed them during rehearsal and cut anything that exceeded a few seconds of pure logistics without entertainment layered on top.
The Rehearsal Implication
If transitions are performances, they must be rehearsed like performances. This principle seems obvious once stated, but most performers — including me, for too long — violate it.
The typical rehearsal: practice effect one until smooth, practice effect two until smooth, practice effect three until smooth, then run all three in sequence and let the transitions happen on the fly.
The better rehearsal: practice effect one, then practice the transition from effect one to effect two as its own discrete unit, then practice effect two, then practice the transition from two to three, then practice effect three. The transitions receive dedicated rehearsal time proportional to their role in the audience’s experience.
Graham’s refinement cycle — Perform, Think, Observe, Review, Repeat — must include transitions as objects of observation and review. When you watch recorded performances, watch the transitions with the same critical eye you apply to the effects. Where does energy dip? Where does your posture break? Where does the audience disengage? Those observations become the basis for targeted improvement.
I now spend roughly equal rehearsal time on effects and transitions. In a forty-five-minute show with seven or eight effects, there are six or seven transitions. If each runs thirty seconds to a minute, total transition time is three to seven minutes. That is a significant portion of the show. Three to seven minutes of dead time is three to seven minutes of lost connection. Three to seven minutes of alive transition is three to seven minutes of deepened relationship.
Why I Love Them Now
I said at the beginning that transitions are now my favorite part of the show. I want to explain what I mean by that.
The effects are satisfying. The gasp, the laugh, the applause — these are the obvious rewards of performing. But the effects are also, in a sense, automatic. I have rehearsed them to the point where they happen reliably, and the audience’s response, while gratifying, follows a predictable pattern. The magic does its job.
The transitions are where I feel most present. Most responsive. Most like myself. The script is there, but it is lighter than the effect scripts. There is more room to breathe, to react, to notice something in the room and comment on it, to make eye contact with someone in the third row who is laughing and acknowledge that moment of shared amusement. The transitions are the spaces where Felix the person is most visible on stage, and where the connection between me and the audience is most purely human.
When I tell a brief story about how I started learning magic in hotel rooms, and someone in the front row nods because they also spend their life traveling for work, that is a different kind of connection than a gasping reaction to an impossible effect. The effect says: this performer can do extraordinary things. The transition says: this performer is someone I recognize. Someone I could talk to.
Both connections matter. But the second is what makes people remember the show. Not the tricks. The person between the tricks.
Transitions are not the spaces between performances. They are the performance. And once you start treating them that way, the whole show transforms.