For about two years, I was convinced my strongest effect was the one that took me the longest to master.
It made sense to me at the time. I’d put enormous effort into that piece. I’d worked on it in hotel rooms for months. I’d rebuilt it three times. When it finally came together, I felt that specific performer’s satisfaction of something clicking into place after a long struggle. The effort was embedded in the effect for me. Every time I performed it, I could feel the months behind it.
The audiences, of course, couldn’t feel any of that.
What they actually responded to — consistently, measurably, in ways I could see if I bothered to look — was a much simpler piece. One I’d learned faster, thought less about, and had honestly always considered a warm-up. A bit of fun to get the room comfortable before the real work began.
It took me longer than I should admit to reconcile those two things.
The Bias Is Built Into the Craft
There’s a structural problem here that I don’t think gets discussed enough. The way most performers develop a show, the effects you spend the most time on naturally become the ones you care about most. Your emotional investment tracks your labor investment. This makes psychological sense — effort creates attachment, and attachment creates the feeling that something is valuable.
But the audience doesn’t see your investment. They see the effect.
And from their side, what determines an effect’s power has nothing to do with how long it took you to develop. It has to do with clarity of effect (can they understand what happened?), emotional impact (does it make them feel something?), and surprise differential (how far is the result from what they expected?). Those three things are largely independent of your effort level. A simple effect, clearly presented with genuine conviction, can score higher on all three than a technically sophisticated effect that’s slightly muddied by its own complexity.
I understood this intellectually before I applied it honestly to my own work. That’s always the gap, isn’t it.
What the Video Told Me
After a show in Salzburg — a private corporate dinner, smallish room, mixed audience of executives and their partners — I got hold of a recording. This happens occasionally; someone from the client side or the venue shoots informal video, and if you ask politely, they’ll usually share it.
I watched it looking for the moments where the audience most visibly responded. Not politely. Not out of politeness or obligation. The moments where something in the body language changed, where people leaned toward each other, where the laughter or reaction was involuntary rather than social.
The two highest-response moments in the recording were not the effect I considered my anchor piece. They were a piece I’d done for years without thinking much about it — easy to perform, clean, relatively brief — and a moment of apparently improvised interaction that came out of a volunteer response I hadn’t expected.
My centerpiece — the one I’d rebuilt three times, the one I thought about during the drive to the venue — landed well. Solid response. But not the peak response. Not even close.
This was uncomfortable. Not devastating, but uncomfortable in the specific way that honest data tends to be uncomfortable when it contradicts a preferred story about yourself.
The Performer’s Enjoyment Bias
Darwin Ortiz writes about this problem in a way that stuck with me. He points out that performers gravitate toward performing the effects they most enjoy performing — which is natural and partially good, because enthusiasm is visible — but that performer enjoyment and audience impact are not the same variable. An effect can be technically fascinating to execute and fail to move an audience. An effect can be simple and almost boring to perform after a thousand repetitions and still floor a room.
The danger is in mistaking your personal relationship with an effect for the audience’s relationship with it. One is about you. The other is the only one that matters when you’re in front of people.
This doesn’t mean you should stop performing effects you enjoy. Genuine engagement with the material is real and it shows. But it does mean you should test your assumptions about which effects are serving the audience best and which are serving your sense of yourself as a performer.
The Feedback Problem
Part of the reason this bias persists is that post-show feedback is unreliable in a specific way. After a show, people will tell you what they think you want to hear. They’ll praise the sophisticated piece because it seems like the kind of thing worth praising — you could see the effort in it, you clearly valued it, and social pressure toward complimenting what the performer seems invested in is real.
They’re less likely to say “actually the simple thing you did near the beginning — that was the one that got me.” Not because it’s untrue, but because it sounds trivial, like you’re complimenting a chef’s bread rolls rather than the main course.
So if you rely on what people tell you after shows, you’re getting data that’s been filtered through their social instincts. You need to find the data that bypasses those filters.
Video is one route. A trusted person in the room with a specific brief — not “tell me what you think” but “tell me when the energy in the room changed” — is another. Tracking your own physiological read of the room in real time is a third, but requires enough experience that you can separate your performer’s anxiety from accurate crowd-reading.
What doesn’t work is intuition alone, especially intuition shaped by years of emotional investment in certain pieces.
Recalibrating Without Losing What You Love
Here’s what I didn’t want to hear when I first confronted this, and what I now think is actually true: finding out that your assumed centerpiece isn’t your strongest effect doesn’t mean you should stop performing it. It means you should understand it correctly.
Maybe it’s strong in a different way — technically, philosophically, as a piece of craft — and it belongs in your show for reasons that have nothing to do with being your peak moment. Maybe it serves the structure as an escalation point. Maybe it challenges your performance in ways that keep you sharp. These are legitimate reasons to keep something in a show.
But stop expecting it to produce the highest response. And stop designing the rest of the show to build to it as if it’s the peak. If the video shows you that something else is the peak, design to that.
For me, this meant restructuring a show I’d thought was already in good shape. The piece I’d treated as the climax moved to a different position. The simpler piece I’d always considered secondary got placed where the energy it generated could do the most work. The resulting show felt slightly wrong to me for the first few performances, because my internal map of the show was overwritten by the structure I’d assumed for years.
Then the audience responses aligned with what the data had predicted, and the slight wrongness went away.
Asking the Right Question
The question isn’t “what is my best effect?” — which is a performer-centric question that leads you back to your biases. The question is “what produces the strongest audience response, and why?”
That’s a director’s question. It requires you to watch your own show from outside yourself, which is genuinely difficult and genuinely necessary.
The effect you think is your strongest — the one you labored over, the one that feels most like you — might be your best. The video might confirm your instincts. This happens. But check the video before you assume it. The assumption is almost never as accurate as we’d like it to be.
The audience will show you what matters to them, if you’re willing to look.