The nine questions came to me secondhand, the way most of my best tools do — through a book about magic that turned out to be about something much larger. Pete McCabe devotes a section of Scripting Magic 2 to Uta Hagen’s framework for actors, and when I first read through the list, I nearly dismissed it.
The questions are:
- Who am I?
- What time is it?
- Where am I?
- What surrounds me?
- What are the circumstances?
- What is my relationship?
- What do I want?
- What is in my way?
- What do I do to get what I want?
My first reaction, sitting in a hotel room in Klagenfurt at the end of a long consulting day, was that these were obvious. Trivially obvious. Of course I know who I am. Of course I know where I am. I am Felix, I am at a corporate event, I want the trick to work. Done.
But McCabe’s point, and the point Hagen was making, is not that you should answer these questions in the most superficial way possible. It is that you should answer them deeply, specifically, and with enough detail that the answers actually change how you perform. And when I finally did that — when I sat down and worked through all nine questions with genuine care — the effect on my performances was immediate and startling.
The First Question That Changed Everything
Who am I?
This seems like the simplest question in the world. I am Felix Lenhard. I am a strategy and innovation consultant based in Austria. I co-founded Vulpine Creations with Adam Wilber. I came to magic as an adult, starting with card tricks in hotel rooms.
But that is not what Hagen means. Hagen’s “Who am I?” is an actor’s question. It asks: in this performance, in this moment, who is the character I am playing? What does he know? What does he believe? What are his strengths and weaknesses? What is his history?
For a long time, my answer to this question was essentially “myself.” I perform as myself. I am not playing a wizard or a mentalist character or a mysterious figure. I am just Felix, doing magic.
But “just Felix” is not specific enough. Because the version of Felix who walks on stage at a corporate keynote in Vienna is not exactly the same as the Felix who sits in a strategy meeting or the Felix who practices card sleights in a hotel room at midnight. The performance version of me is a curated self — he is more confident, more playful, more willing to take risks. He is the version of me who genuinely believes, for the duration of the performance, that something extraordinary is possible.
When I started defining this character more precisely — not as a separate persona but as a specific, heightened version of myself — the performances gained a focus they had lacked. I knew which version of me was walking on stage. And that clarity changed everything from how I held my body to how I delivered my opening line.
The Questions Nobody Thinks About
What time is it? What surrounds me? These sound like logistical details, and they are. But they are logistical details that directly affect performance in ways most magicians never consider.
“What time is it?” is not just the clock time. It is the time in the event. Is it after lunch, when energy is low and attention spans are short? Is it after the keynote speeches, when the audience has been sitting for two hours and desperately wants something different? Is it the opening act of the evening, when energy is high but attention is scattered because people are still settling in?
Each of these timing situations requires a different energy, a different pacing, a different approach. When I perform after a long conference day in Linz, my opening is higher energy and more physically engaging than when I perform as the evening entertainment at a gala in Salzburg where the audience is relaxed and receptive. The tricks might be the same. The character adjusts to the time.
“What surrounds me?” is about the physical environment. Is the stage large or small? Is the lighting warm or harsh? Is the audience at round tables or in theater seating? Are there columns blocking sightlines? Is there a bar at the back of the room where people are still getting drinks?
I used to ignore these factors or treat them as annoyances. Now I answer this question deliberately before every performance, and the answer changes my blocking, my positioning, my volume, and my choice of which effects to open with. A mentalism piece that requires focused attention does not work well when there is a bar at the back of the room with a constant stream of traffic. A visual effect that requires everyone to see my hands does not work when half the room has obstructed sightlines.
The Circumstance Question
What are the circumstances? Hagen breaks this into past, present, and future. For an actor playing Romeo, the past circumstances include being a Montague, being raised to hate the Capulets, being young and impetuous. The present circumstances include being at a party, seeing Juliet for the first time. The future circumstances include the possibility of love, the threat of family conflict.
For a magician at a corporate event, the circumstance question is just as rich, even though we tend to ignore it entirely.
Past circumstances: What has happened at this event before I go on? Was the last speaker boring or brilliant? Did the CEO just announce layoffs, or did she just announce record profits? Has there been a controversy? Has there been a success? The audience arrives at my performance carrying all of this context, and if I ignore it, I am ignoring the reality they are living in.
Present circumstances: What is the energy in the room right now? Are people engaged or distracted? Are they seated close together or spread out? Are they warm or cold? Have they been drinking? Are they with colleagues they like or colleagues they tolerate?
Future circumstances: What are they looking forward to after my performance? Is dinner coming? Is the party ending? Is there a big announcement still to come? Understanding what the audience is anticipating helps me calibrate how much energy to bring, how long to perform, and how to close.
I now arrive at every event early enough to assess these circumstances. I talk to the event planner. I talk to the catering staff. I observe the room during the cocktail hour. By the time I walk on stage, I have answered the circumstance question in enough detail to make real adjustments to my performance.
What Do I Want?
This is the question that actors consider the engine of every scene, and it is the question that most magicians have never asked themselves.
What do I want?
Not what does the trick require. Not what is the next step in the routine. What does my character — the performance version of Felix — want in this moment?
When I first tried to answer this question, my answer was embarrassingly vague: “I want the show to go well.” That is not an objective. That is a hope. An objective has to be specific, active, and directed at the audience.
After working through this question many times, my answer for most performances has become: I want this audience to experience a moment where they genuinely believe something impossible has happened. Not to fool them. Not to impress them. To create a shared moment of wonder that they will remember and talk about.
This objective changes how I perform. When my goal is to fool people, I perform with the energy of someone trying to prove something. When my goal is to create a moment of wonder, I perform with the energy of someone who is sharing something. The difference is subtle in description but enormous in practice. The first is competitive. The second is generous.
What Is in My Way?
Hagen breaks this into physical obstacles, character flaws, and agents working against you. For an actor, these are the dramatic barriers that create tension and interest. For a performer, they are the real-world barriers that stand between you and a successful show.
Physical obstacles: The room is too large. The lighting is bad. The sound system is inadequate. The stage is too far from the audience. These are real obstacles that affect every corporate event I perform at, and acknowledging them as obstacles rather than ignoring them changes how I prepare.
Character flaws: This is the uncomfortable one. What about my performance character is working against me? For me, the honest answer includes a tendency to speak too quickly when I am nervous, a habit of defaulting to analytical language when I should be emotional, and a reluctance to hold silence. These are my character’s flaws, and being aware of them means I can actively work against them during the performance.
Agents working against me: In a corporate event context, this can be literal. The event planner who scheduled me in a time slot that is too short. The audiovisual technician who does not take the sound check seriously. The competing attractions — the dessert table, the photo booth, the colleague who keeps getting up to take phone calls. These are not enemies, but they are forces working against the performance, and acknowledging them helps me strategize around them.
The Pre-Performance Ritual
I now answer all nine questions before every performance. Not casually. Deliberately. Usually in writing, in a small notebook I carry to every event.
The process takes about fifteen minutes. Sometimes I do it in the car on the way to the venue. Sometimes I do it in a quiet corner backstage. Sometimes I do it in my hotel room the night before, lying on the bed, working through each question with my eyes closed.
The answers are never the same twice, because no two performances are the same. The venue is different. The audience is different. The circumstances are different. The obstacles are different. And because the answers are different, the performance is different — tailored to this specific room, this specific audience, this specific moment.
This is what Hagen’s framework does. It forces you out of the generic and into the specific. It prevents you from performing the same show on autopilot at every event. It makes you think about who you are, where you are, and what you want in enough detail that your performance becomes a living response to real conditions rather than a canned presentation of rehearsed material.
The Question Most Magicians Skip
If I had to choose the single most valuable question from Hagen’s nine, it would be number seven: What do I want?
Most magicians I have spoken with, when pressed on this question, give answers that are about the trick rather than about the audience. “I want the card to appear in the right place.” “I want the prediction to match.” “I want the routine to work.”
These are technical objectives. They are about execution. They say nothing about what you are trying to create in the audience’s experience.
The question is not what do you want to happen. The question is what do you want. What is your objective as a character, as a human being standing in front of other human beings? What are you pursuing? What is at stake for you?
When you answer this question with real emotional stakes — “I want this audience to forget, for thirty seconds, that they are at a corporate function and instead feel genuine wonder” — your performance acquires a direction and a purpose that no amount of technical rehearsal can provide.
I carry Hagen’s nine questions with me to every event. They fit on a single notebook page. They take fifteen minutes to answer. And they have done more for my performances than any single book, any single technique, any single piece of advice I have ever received.
Nine questions. Every performance. No exceptions.