There was a night — I can tell you the city was Graz, I can tell you it was a private corporate event, late autumn — when every single effect worked. Every one. The timing was right. The words landed where I’d planned them to land. The reactions were loud and immediate. The room was with me from the opener to the close. I didn’t fumble a single thing.
I drove home and felt nothing.
Not the particular nothing of exhaustion, which is something performers know well and which has its own comfortable weight. A different nothing. A hollow feeling, like I’d put in a full day at work and produced a technically correct spreadsheet.
I sat with that feeling for a few days before I understood what it was.
The Trap of Technical Success
When you are learning to perform — really learning, from nothing — your attention is necessarily consumed by survival. Will the effect work? Will you drop something? Will your mind go blank in front of sixty people? These anxieties are so loud that getting through a show without disaster feels like victory. And for a while, it is.
As you improve, a different problem emerges. The technical floor rises. You stop worrying about disaster because disaster stops happening. The effects work reliably. The words come reliably. The reactions come reliably. You’ve built a functional machine.
And then one day the machine runs perfectly and you realize the machine isn’t the point.
Tommy Wonder, in his books on performance philosophy, writes about the difference between performing an effect and believing in it — what he calls the inside approach versus simply executing a sequence. The idea being that technical proficiency without genuine internal conviction produces something the audience can sense even if they can’t name it. A correctly assembled experience that somehow doesn’t feel real.
I had assembled a correct experience in Graz. Everything was in its right place. The structure was sound, the effects were strong, the pacing was what it should have been. But I had been, in some way I couldn’t fully articulate, absent. Going through the sequence rather than inhabiting it.
What Connection Actually Feels Like
I want to be careful here not to slide into vague performance mysticism, because I don’t think this is mystical. I think it’s concrete.
Connection, in the context of a show, is the sustained presence of your attention on the people in front of you rather than on the execution of your program. It’s the difference between looking at the audience to give them your next line and looking at the audience to see how they’re doing. Subtle, but not the same thing.
When I’m connected — genuinely present in a show — I notice things. I notice the man in the third row who understood the effect a beat before everyone else. I notice the woman near the window whose guard dropped at a specific moment. I notice when the room breathes together, when there’s a shared moment of suspension before a reaction breaks. These things are happening in every show. The question is whether I’m there to catch them.
In Graz, I wasn’t catching them. I was executing. The program ran and the reactions were generated and the evening proceeded. But I was somewhere behind my own performance, watching myself deliver effects rather than being in the room with the people I was supposedly performing for.
The effects were perfect. The performance was hollow. And the audience — in that uncomfortable way that audiences sometimes know things before you do — could feel the difference, even if what they described afterward was a technically excellent evening.
The Paradox of Mastery
Here’s what makes this strange: the very competence I’d worked years to build was enabling me to disappear from my own show.
Because the material was secure, I didn’t need to be fully present to execute it. The effects would happen whether I was genuinely there or not. I’d automated the machine so effectively that I’d automated myself right out of it.
This is a paradox that skill-building books don’t often address, because they’re focused on the acquisition of competence rather than on what you do with it once you have it. Derren Brown writes, in his work on performance philosophy, about conviction — specifically about the danger of confusing technical fluency with genuine belief. The performer who has run an effect a thousand times can run it on autopilot. Whether they should is a different question.
Conviction, as a performance quality, requires constant renewal. You have to decide again, for each show, for each audience, that this matters. That these effects are worth doing. That the person in front of you deserves your full presence, not a recording of your best self.
That decision cannot be automated.
What I Changed
After Graz, I made a small adjustment that had a disproportionate effect on how my shows felt.
Before each performance, I stopped reviewing the sequence of effects. I knew the sequence. What I started doing instead was spending five minutes thinking about one or two people I’d already met in the room — something they’d said, something I’d noticed — and deciding that those two people were the reason I was there. Not the whole room. Two specific people.
This sounds faintly ridiculous, and I felt faintly ridiculous doing it. But what it did was bring me into the room rather than into the program. When I started performing, I was looking for those two people. I was tracking them. And the act of tracking two real human beings in the room meant I was present in the room in a way that reviewing my sequence never produced.
The shows that followed weren’t technically different from Graz. The effects were the same. The pacing was the same. What changed was whether I was actually there.
The Question Behind the Question
The night in Graz forced me to ask a question I’d been avoiding: why do I do this?
Not in a crisis-of-purpose way. Practically. What is the actual goal when I perform? Is it to execute effects cleanly? Is it to generate reactions? Is it to demonstrate competence? Or is it something else — something that requires another human being to actually receive what you’re offering?
I think the answer, when I’m honest about it, is the last one. The real reason to perform is for the shared moment — the moment where something genuinely extraordinary happens in the space between you and the people watching. That moment requires two parties. It cannot happen in a machine.
Technical perfection is necessary but not sufficient. It builds the stage. It doesn’t build the show.
The spreadsheet was correct. The work wasn’t done.