Derren Brown tells a story in Absolute Magic about his actor friend Peter Clifford. Clifford described his process for performing a role: after rigorously memorizing his lines, he must allow himself to forget them. When he walks on stage, he does not know what he will say until the words come out. Everything is said for the first time. On bad nights, when he starts consciously acting, the script pops back into his mind’s eye and the performance becomes a veneer.
When I read that, something clicked that had been bothering me for a long time about my own performances. I had been noticing that my best shows — the ones where the audience truly connected, where the magic landed with genuine impact — were the ones where I somehow forgot I was performing. Where the words came out as if I were saying them for the first time. Where the impossible moment surprised me as much as it surprised the audience.
And my worst shows were the ones where I could hear myself performing. Where every word sounded rehearsed, every gesture looked planned, every reaction felt manufactured. Where the audience could see, even if they could not articulate it, that they were watching something that had been done many times before.
The goal, I realized, is to make the audience believe that this is the first time I have ever done this. Not because I am deceiving them about my level of preparation, but because the performance should feel that alive, that spontaneous, that real.
The Paradox of Recreation
This is the great paradox of live performance. The audience wants to feel they are witnessing something unique. Something happening right now, right here, for the first time. But the performer achieves this sense of spontaneity only through relentless preparation. The performance feels fresh because it has been practiced so many times that the mechanics have disappeared entirely, leaving only the living experience.
Brown uses Stanislavski’s concept of the “Magic If” to explain this. Rather than acting the cliche of an emotion — trembling for fear, wide eyes for surprise — the skilled performer asks: “What would I do if this were really happening?” This produces honest, resonant responses instead of performed ones.
Applied to magic, the Magic If is transformative. Instead of performing a card revelation the way I have rehearsed it, I ask: what would I do if a card actually, genuinely, impossibly appeared in someone’s pocket right now? I would be astonished. I would be delighted. I would be a little bit unnerved. I would react with the natural, unscripted response of a human being confronting something impossible.
And here is the thing: if I commit fully to that response, the audience reads it as genuine. Because in that moment, it is genuine. The conviction Joshua Jay describes — the performer’s own belief in what is happening — takes over. I am not pretending to be surprised. I am allowing myself to experience surprise, because the alternative — performing the reaction — produces something the audience can detect as false.
Mac King’s Engineered Spontaneity
Jay, in How Magicians Think, describes Mac King’s remarkable ability to create what Jay calls “engineered spontaneity.” Through nonverbal cueing and meticulous scripting, King creates the same hilarious, apparently spontaneous moment in every single show. Every first-time viewer believes they are seeing him on the funniest night of his career. Nobody suspects that the moment has been calibrated, tested, and refined across thousands of performances.
This is the master-level version of what I am describing. The performance is so thoroughly prepared that it has circled all the way back to spontaneity. The preparation has not killed the freshness — it has created the conditions for freshness to exist.
I think about this in terms of my consulting work, where I often draw an analogy between expertise and improvisation. A jazz musician does not improvise from nothing. She improvises from deep knowledge of harmony, rhythm, form, and the vocabulary of the tradition. The knowledge provides the structure. The improvisation happens within and around that structure. The audience hears freedom, but the freedom is built on a foundation of disciplined mastery.
Magic works the same way. The script provides the structure. The moves are rehearsed until they are automatic. The running order is locked. And within that structure, the performer is free to be present, to react genuinely, to discover the performance fresh each time.
Eugene Burger, quoted in Scripting Magic, put it this way: “By having a script I have the freedom to depart from it.” The script is not a prison. It is a safety net. Knowing that the words are there — that if you go blank, the script will catch you — frees you to stop thinking about the words and start experiencing the moment.
How I Practice First-Time Energy
I have developed a practice method for this that may sound strange, but it works for me.
After I have a routine fully memorized — script, moves, timing, all of it locked down — I stop practicing it in the traditional sense. Instead, I practice recreation.
I set up in my hotel room or at home in Salzburg. I put the props in their starting positions. And then I perform the routine as if I have never done it before. I pretend I am discovering the effect in real time. I allow myself to react to what is happening as if it is new information.
The first few times, this feels ridiculous. I know exactly what is going to happen. I scripted every word. I designed every moment. How can I pretend to be surprised?
But something shifts after a few repetitions. The pretending starts to feel less like pretending and more like permission. I am giving myself permission to experience the effect from the audience’s perspective rather than the performer’s perspective. I am letting go of the god’s-eye view — where I know everything that is about to happen — and adopting the human view, where the future is unknown.
Brown describes this as the difference between repeating an effect and recreating it. Repeating is mechanical: you execute the same moves in the same order and say the same words. Recreating is alive: you experience the same effect fresh, responding to it genuinely, discovering it as if for the first time.
The difference is audible. When I repeat, my voice has the flat quality of recitation. When I recreate, my voice has the texture of genuine speech — the pauses come in natural places, the emphasis falls on the words that matter to me in the moment, the pacing reflects real thought rather than memorized rhythm.
The Audience Can Tell
This is the part that skeptics push back on. They say: the audience does not care whether you are performing fresh or performing rote. They cannot tell the difference. All they see is the effect.
I used to believe this too. I do not believe it anymore.
The audience may not be able to articulate the difference, but they can feel it. A performance that is being recreated has a quality of aliveness that a rote performance lacks. The performer’s eyes are different. Their energy is different. The small, unconscious moments — a micro-expression of genuine surprise, a half-second of authentic uncertainty, a spontaneous smile — these communicate at a level below conscious awareness.
Jay quotes Sanford Meisner’s principle: “Actors and magicians must live truthfully in untruthful circumstances.” The audience can detect truth. They may not be able to identify it, but they respond to it. When a performer is living the moment — genuinely experiencing the effect, genuinely engaged with the spectator — the audience leans in. When a performer is executing a rehearsed sequence, the audience watches politely but keeps their emotional distance.
The difference shows up most clearly in how the audience responds in the moments after the magic. When the performance has been recreated, the audience takes a beat. They sit in the silence. They process. They feel. When the performance has been executed, the audience applauds on cue and moves on. The first response is emotional. The second is social. Both look like success from the outside. Only one is.
The Vulnerability of First-Time Energy
There is a risk in performing with first-time energy. You are more exposed. More vulnerable. You are not hiding behind the safety of a polished routine. You are letting the audience see a version of you that reacts, that wonders, that does not know what comes next.
This vulnerability is, I think, why so many performers avoid it. It is much safer to execute than to recreate. Execution is controllable. Recreation is not. When you commit to first-time energy, you might stumble. You might pause too long. You might react in a way that does not serve the script. You might lose your place.
All of these things have happened to me. And every time, the performance was better for it. Because the stumble was human. The long pause created tension. The unexpected reaction made the moment feel real. The brief uncertainty communicated that something was actually happening, not just being displayed.
The audience does not want perfection. They want reality. They want to believe that what they are seeing is happening right now, in this moment, for the first time. And the only way to give them that belief is to perform as if it is true.
The Connection to Conviction
Jay’s concept of conviction is the deeper mechanism at work here. Conviction is the performer’s own belief in what is happening. When muscle memory takes over from thousands of repetitions, the performer can stop thinking about the method and start experiencing the effect from the audience’s perspective. Jay describes convincing himself that a coin really is in his closed fist even when it is not. Not as self-deception, but as full commitment to the dramatic reality.
First-time energy is what conviction looks like from the outside. When the performer is fully convinced, they are not performing a trick. They are experiencing something extraordinary. And that experience reads as first-time because it has the emotional freshness of genuine discovery.
This is what I aspire to in every performance. Not the appearance of spontaneity — which is just another form of acting — but the experience of spontaneity within a thoroughly prepared structure. The script is there. The moves are automatic. The structure is locked. And within that structure, I am free to discover, to react, to be surprised, to be human.
The highest compliment I have ever received after a performance was from a colleague at a conference in Vienna who said: “It looked like even you could not believe what just happened.”
She was right. In that moment, I could not.
And that is the goal. Every single time.