There is a quote attributed to Picasso that I have carried with me since I first encountered it, long before I had any connection to magic or performance: “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.” I found it in a business context, during a strategy workshop where someone used it to argue for simplifying a client presentation. The argument was persuasive. The presentation was cut from sixty slides to twenty-two. The client loved it. Fewer slides, more impact.
Years later, standing in my home office in Austria staring at a table covered with props, scripts, music cue sheets, and a show that ran forty-three minutes when it should have run thirty, I remembered that quote and realized it applied to me with a force I was not prepared for. Because the problem was not that my show needed more. The problem was that my show needed less. Much less. And every instinct I had as a performer was screaming at me not to cut.
The Collector’s Instinct
The instinct to add is natural. It is almost biological. When you are building a show from scratch, as I was, every new effect feels like progress. Every new joke feels like insurance. Every new transition feels like another stitch in the fabric. You accumulate material the way a bird builds a nest: gathering everything that looks useful, weaving it together, and feeling accomplished as the structure grows.
I accumulated relentlessly. By the time I had been performing my corporate keynote show for about four months, it had expanded from its original thirty-minute design to well over forty minutes. Every expansion felt justified in the moment. This effect got a great reaction — I should keep it. This joke always lands — I should keep it. This interactive moment is fun — I should keep it. This piece has a great music cue — I should keep it.
The problem with keeping everything that works individually is that the collection stops working collectively. A forty-three-minute show is not a thirty-minute show with thirteen extra minutes of quality material. It is a thirty-minute show that has been diluted by thirteen minutes of good-but-not-essential additions that slow the pacing, muddy the arc, and exhaust the audience’s attention budget before the closer arrives.
I did not see this from the inside. From the inside, every piece felt necessary. It took an outside perspective — a conversation after a show in Vienna with a friend who happens to work in television production — to hear the truth I had been avoiding. She said: “Your show is very good. It is also too long. The first twenty-five minutes are excellent. The last eighteen minutes are fine. You should figure out where the excellent stops and the fine starts, and cut everything after that line.”
Twenty-five minutes of excellent. Eighteen minutes of fine. And the suggestion that “fine” is the enemy.
The First Cut
The first cut was the hardest. I removed a visual effect that I had spent weeks learning and that consistently generated applause. The effect was good. The audience liked it. It worked every time. But it sat in the middle of the show at a point where the energy should have been climbing, and instead of climbing, the energy leveled off because the audience was processing another piece of visual magic when they should have been leaning into the emotional build toward the mentalism section.
Removing a piece that works is counterintuitive. Every metric says keep it. The audience claps. The execution is clean. The effect is strong. But the question is not whether the piece works in isolation. The question is whether the piece serves the show. And this piece, good as it was, did not serve the show. It served my ego. It was in the show because I was proud of it, not because the show needed it.
The next rehearsal without that piece felt wrong. The show was shorter. The gap where the effect used to sit felt like a missing tooth. My instinct was to fill it — to slot in something else, to maintain the density of material, to ensure that every minute was packed with content.
I resisted. I let the gap become a transition. A breath. A moment where the audience could settle before the next section began. And the show, without the piece, was better. Not marginally better. Noticeably better. The energy line, which had been plateauing in the middle, now climbed continuously from the opening to the closer. Removing one good piece fixed the arc of the entire show.
That was the lesson that opened the door to everything that followed.
Cut, Then Cut Again
Once I understood that cutting a good piece could improve the show, I became methodical about it. The strategy consultant in me needed a framework, so I built one.
I reviewed every piece in the show and asked three questions. First: does this piece generate one of the three essential audience responses — rapt attention, laughter, or astonishment? Second: does this piece serve the overall arc of the show, or does it interrupt or flatten that arc? Third: if I removed this piece, would the show be worse?
The third question was the most revealing. For several pieces, the honest answer was: the show would be the same, or the show would be marginally better. These pieces were not hurting the show. They were occupying space in the show without earning their place. They were fine. And fine, as my television-producer friend had diagnosed, was the problem.
I cut three more pieces over the following month. Each cut was painful. Each cut removed material that I liked, that I had rehearsed, that I was competent at performing. Each cut also removed material that the audience would never miss, because they had never needed it. The audience did not come to see every trick I could do. They came to have an experience. And the experience was being compromised by quantity.
The show went from forty-three minutes to thirty-one. From nine effects to six. From a packed, breathless tour of everything I could do to a curated, paced, deliberately structured experience with room to breathe. The thirty-one-minute show got stronger reactions than the forty-three-minute show had ever gotten. Not because the remaining material was better — it was the same material — but because each remaining piece now had space to land fully, to resonate, to occupy the audience’s attention completely before the next piece began.
The Courage Problem
I want to be honest about why cutting is so hard, because I think the difficulty is not practical but psychological. Practically, cutting is simple. You remove a piece. The show is shorter. You rehearse the new version. Done.
Psychologically, cutting is brutal. Every piece you remove is a piece you invested time in learning, rehearsing, and performing. Every piece has a memory attached to it — the first time it landed, the audience that laughed the hardest, the event where it saved a difficult moment. Cutting a piece feels like cutting a part of yourself, like admitting that the time you spent on it was wasted.
It was not wasted. This is the reframe that made cutting possible for me. The time spent on a piece that is eventually cut is not wasted because the piece served its purpose during the period when it was in the show. It was part of a version of the show that was necessary at that time, for that stage of development. The show evolved past it. That is not failure. That is growth.
Alexander’s warning resonates here — the reminder that if you think you have a perfect act, you are dead in the water. Cutting material is the most vivid expression of the refusal to stagnate. It says: this show is alive, and alive things shed what they no longer need. The snake does not mourn its old skin. The tree does not grieve for last year’s leaves. The show does not need to hold onto material that served a previous version of itself.
This framing helped. But I will not pretend it made cutting easy. It made cutting possible. Easy is not part of the process.
The Picasso Principle in Practice
Picasso’s line about the elimination of the unnecessary becomes more radical the more you think about it. He does not say “the elimination of the bad.” He says “the unnecessary.” Good material can be unnecessary. Great material can be unnecessary. The question is not quality but function. Does this serve the work? If not, it goes. Regardless of how good it is.
Applied to show construction, this means asking not “is this a good effect?” but “does the show need this effect?” These are different questions with frequently different answers. I own effects that are wonderful in isolation — strong, surprising, well-rehearsed, reliably effective — that do not belong in my show because the show does not need them. They do not advance the arc. They do not fill a gap. They do not serve a function that is not already being served by something else.
The unnecessary is not the same as the unwanted. I want to perform those effects. I enjoy them. They make me feel like a competent performer. But wanting to perform something is a reason that serves me, not a reason that serves the audience. And the show exists for the audience.
Graham makes the same point from the other direction when he observes that there is never a trick, a joke, a music cue, or even a table that cannot be improved. The implication is that the show is always being sculpted, and sculpting means removing material as much as it means adding it. You do not sculpt by adding clay. You sculpt by taking it away.
What Remains After the Cutting
Here is what my show looks like now, after the cutting. Six pieces. Thirty-one minutes. Each piece is there because it serves a specific function in the arc: the opener grabs attention, the second piece builds connection, the third piece generates laughter, the fourth piece creates wonder, the fifth piece deepens the emotional engagement, and the closer delivers the climax that everything has been building toward.
There is nothing in the show that is there because I like it. Everything is there because the show needs it. This distinction feels cold when I write it, but in practice, it is liberating. When every piece has a reason to be there, every piece gets my full commitment. There is no coasting through a mediocre middle section, no going through the motions on a piece that is filling time, no private awareness that this next bit is the weak link I have not gotten around to replacing. Every piece is essential. Every piece gets my best energy. And the audience feels the difference between a show where every moment is essential and a show where some moments are filler disguised as content.
The six remaining pieces are not the six best effects I own, judged in isolation. They are the six effects that create the best show when performed in this order, with these transitions, for this audience. Individual quality is secondary to collective impact. A slightly weaker effect in the right position in the arc outperforms a slightly stronger effect in the wrong position, because the show is a system, not a playlist.
The Bridge to What Comes Next
This is the final post in this category, and it feels right to end with elimination, because elimination is where show construction reaches its mature form. You learn effects. You learn transitions. You learn music and lighting and staging. You build a show from everything you have learned. And then you take it apart, piece by piece, until only the essential remains.
What comes next — and this is where the journey leads for me — is the realization that once the structure is right, once the unnecessary has been eliminated, the frontier shifts from what you do to what you say. The show is built. The arc is clean. The effects are in their right positions. Now the question becomes: is every word earning its place the way every effect earned its place?
The same principle that governs effect selection governs scripting. Every line should be there because the script needs it, not because the performer likes the sound of it. Every word should serve a function — building tension, generating laughter, creating connection, advancing the narrative. The unnecessary word is as destructive as the unnecessary effect, just at a smaller scale.
I have spent the past several months learning to cut effects. The next phase is learning to cut words. To apply the Picasso principle not just to the structure of the show but to the language within it. To eliminate the unnecessary at every level, from the macro of which effects to include down to the micro of which syllables to speak.
Art is the elimination of the unnecessary. I believe this about strategy presentations. I believe this about product design. I believe this about the thirty-one-minute show that I perform at corporate events across Austria. And I am beginning to believe it about every single sentence I speak on stage.
The show got better when I cut half the material. It got better again when I cut more. It will get better again when I turn the same ruthless eye on the words. Because the principle has no lower limit. There is always more unnecessary to find. There is always more art to reveal by removing what is hiding it.
Picasso was right. He was always right. I just needed a forty-three-minute show and a friend who works in television to understand what he meant.