For the first year of performing my stage show, I treated my case the way most people treat a suitcase at an airport. It was a thing I carried. It held my stuff. When I needed something, I went and got it. When I was done with something, I put it back. The case was a container. Nothing more.
I was wrong about the case the way I was wrong about a lot of things during that first year. Which is to say: completely, fundamentally, and in a way that now seems almost comically obvious.
The case is not a container. The case is a partner. And the moments when you go to your case — those brief, transitional seconds between one effect and the next — are not dead time to be minimized. They are some of the most useful, most versatile, and most deceptively powerful moments in your entire performance.
It took me a long time to understand this. Let me tell you how I got there.
The Transition Problem
When I first started building my thirty-minute show, I was obsessed with the effects themselves. I spent weeks choosing them, months rehearsing them, and countless hotel-room hours refining the scripts and timing. And the effects were good. They worked. The individual pieces landed.
But the spaces between the effects were a disaster.
The transitions — those moments when one effect ended and the next began — felt awkward, exposed, and mechanical. I would finish a piece, receive some applause, then walk to my case, rummage around for the next prop, walk back to my performing position, and begin the next piece. The audience could see the seams. They could feel the show stopping and restarting, stopping and restarting, like a car lurching through traffic.
I tried to cover the transitions with patter. I would talk while I walked to the case, talk while I found what I needed, talk while I walked back. This helped a little, but it also created a new problem: the patter during transitions often had nothing to do with anything. It was filler, and filler has a distinctive feel that audiences detect even when they cannot name it. The energy would dip during every transition, and I would have to build it back up at the start of every new effect.
The show felt like a series of islands separated by stretches of open water. Each island was fine on its own. But the journey between them was rough.
Rethinking the Case
John Graham’s Stage By Stage changed my entire relationship with what he calls the “table/case” — a hybrid between a table and a case that provides both a working surface and a concealed storage area. His approach treats this piece of equipment not as a passive container but as an active performance tool, one that participates in the show as meaningfully as any prop.
The insight that rearranged my thinking was this: the natural action of going to your case to put something away and pick something up is, from the audience’s perspective, completely logical and expected. You finished a trick. You are putting away the props. You are getting ready for the next one. There is nothing suspicious about it. Nothing that draws scrutiny. It is the most natural, unremarkable thing in the world.
And that very unremarkableness makes it extraordinarily valuable.
Those transition moments — the moments I had been trying to rush through, or fill with empty patter, or minimize — are actually moments of maximum freedom. The audience’s attention is in a relaxed state. The previous effect has concluded. The next one has not begun. They are in a neutral zone where their analytical minds are not engaged. They are not watching your hands with the intensity they bring to the climax of an effect. They are chatting with their neighbor, taking a sip of their drink, settling back in their chair.
This is not dead time. This is opportunity.
The Art of the Natural Action
The principle that Graham taught me — and that I now consider one of the most important staging concepts I have ever learned — is that any action performed during these transition moments, if it is covered by a natural, expected, logical action, becomes essentially invisible.
Think about what happens when you walk to your case at the end of an effect. You are putting away the props you just used. You are picking up the props you need next. These are completely reasonable actions that the audience expects and accepts without question. The coming and going, the putting down and picking up, the brief moment of interaction with your case — all of this is so natural that it barely registers in the audience’s conscious awareness.
This means that the transition is not a gap between effects. It is a bridge. And that bridge can carry far more weight than I ever imagined.
You can use the transition to organize, to prepare, to set up the conditions you need for the next piece. You can use the natural rhythm of putting one thing down and picking another thing up to accomplish a tremendous amount of invisible work. The audience sees you tidying up and getting ready. That is all they see. The transition becomes seamless, and the show flows from one moment to the next without the lurching, stopping-and-starting quality that plagued my early performances.
Designing the Case as a Performance Tool
Once I understood that the case was an active participant in my show, I completely redesigned how I set it up.
Previously, my case was organized for convenience. Props were arranged so I could find them easily. Everything had a place, but that place was determined by size, shape, and practical storage logic. It was organized like a toolbox.
Now, my case is organized for performance flow. Everything is positioned not just so I can find it, but so I can access it at exactly the right moment in exactly the right sequence. The props for my second effect are already positioned where my hands will naturally go after putting away the props from my first effect. The layout of the case mirrors the order of my show.
This means that every trip to the case is efficient, purposeful, and fast. I am never searching. I am never fumbling. I am never standing with my back to the audience for longer than a few seconds. The audience sees a performer who is completely in control, completely organized, completely fluid. What they do not see is that this fluidity is the result of obsessive planning and dozens of rehearsals of just the transitions themselves.
Yes. I rehearse the transitions. Not just the effects. The transitions.
I rehearse walking to the case. I rehearse putting one thing down and picking another thing up. I rehearse the timing of my patter so that the meaningful words land when I am facing the audience, and the throwaway lines land when I am briefly oriented toward the case. I rehearse the physical choreography so that every motion is smooth, deliberate, and natural.
This level of detail might sound excessive. It is not. The transitions are where most shows lose their momentum, and momentum, once lost, is expensive to rebuild.
The Flowing Show
The difference between a show with rehearsed transitions and a show without them is the difference between a river and a series of ponds. One flows. The other sits.
When the transitions are seamless, the audience experiences the show as a continuous experience rather than a collection of discrete moments. One effect leads naturally into the next. The energy builds and sustains rather than repeatedly dropping to zero and rebuilding. The show has momentum, and that momentum carries both the performer and the audience forward through the entire performance.
I first felt this difference at a private event in Salzburg, about eight months after I redesigned my case layout and started rehearsing the transitions. The show was thirty minutes. I had performed the same material dozens of times before. But that night, something was different. The show felt like it was moving downhill, like gravity was pulling it forward from one moment to the next. There were no gaps, no pauses where the energy died, no moments where the audience disengaged. It just flowed.
Afterward, a woman told me something I had never heard before: “It felt like one long trick.” She did not mean she thought I had performed a single effect. She meant the show had felt unified, continuous, like a single experience from start to finish.
That is what happens when your transitions are invisible.
Lessons from the Case
Here is what I have learned from treating my case as a performance partner rather than a storage container.
First: the audience will accept any action that appears natural. If you go to your case with purpose and confidence, if you move like someone who knows exactly what they are doing, the audience will not question what they see. They will accept the transition and wait for the next piece. The key word is “purpose.” If you move tentatively, if you fumble, if you look uncertain about where things are, the audience notices. Confidence in your transitions signals competence in your performance.
Second: the time you spend at your case is proportional to the audience’s patience. You have a few seconds, maybe five or six, of completely free attention. Beyond that, they start to get restless. This means you need to be efficient. You need to know exactly where everything is, exactly what you are doing, and exactly how long it takes. Rehearse until the transition is automatic.
Third: never turn your back to the audience for longer than you absolutely must. A brief moment with your side to the audience is fine — it reads as a natural part of the transition. But an extended period with your back turned breaks the connection. Design your case so you can access it while maintaining at least a side-facing orientation to the audience.
Fourth: the transition is a perfect moment for a line, a joke, or a casual remark that bridges the two effects. Not filler. Not empty patter. A bridge. Something that connects what just happened to what is about to happen, even if the connection is just tonal. The audience’s attention is relaxed during the transition, which means they are receptive to something casual, conversational, and human. Use that receptivity.
Fifth: the case itself communicates something to the audience. A clean, well-organized, professional-looking case signals that you are a professional. A battered, cluttered, disorganized case signals the opposite. This may seem superficial, but audiences read these signals. The case is part of your visual presentation, and it deserves the same attention you give to your costume, your props, and your staging.
From Container to Collaborator
I spent a year treating my case like luggage. I spent another year learning to treat it like a partner. The difference in my show was transformative.
The props did not change. The effects did not change. The scripts did not change. What changed was the invisible architecture — the transitions, the flow, the seamless movement from one moment to the next. And that invisible architecture, I have come to believe, is at least as important as the visible effects it connects.
Every magic show is made of two things: the moments the audience remembers and the spaces between those moments. If you only rehearse the moments, your show will be a collection of highlights separated by dead air. If you rehearse the spaces too — if you design your case as a performance tool, choreograph your transitions, and treat the flow between effects as carefully as you treat the effects themselves — your show becomes something different. Something continuous. Something that feels, as that woman in Salzburg put it, like one long trick.
Your case is not a suitcase. It is your best friend on stage. Treat it accordingly.