There’s a moment in performing that I’ve seen many times and I cannot watch without discomfort: a volunteer on stage does something the performer didn’t want, and the performer — not with cruelty, but with the instinctive self-protection that live performance creates — lets the room see that it was the volunteer’s fault.
Maybe it’s a mild comment. A glance at the audience. A pause that communicates exasperation. Whatever the mechanism, the audience receives the message: this person did something wrong, and the difficulty you’re witnessing is their problem, not mine.
The room might even laugh. Audience laughter is not always evidence that something is working.
I made my version of this mistake early enough in performing that I caught it before it became a habit. Someone on stage with me had responded differently from what I’d expected, and without thinking, I made a half-joking remark that gently put the mistake on them. It was mild. It might have read as friendly. But I saw the volunteer’s face change, just slightly — a microscopic retraction, a small closing of something that had been open.
That image stayed with me. I haven’t done it since.
Why Volunteers Are Vulnerable
The person who comes up on stage takes an enormous social risk. They’re separating themselves from the crowd. They’re being observed by everyone in the room, often people they know professionally, possibly people they want to impress. They’re in an unfamiliar environment, responding to instructions they don’t fully understand, participating in something they haven’t rehearsed.
And the thing about social risk is that it doesn’t feel small to the person taking it. To the audience watching, the volunteer seems fine — relaxed, perhaps even enjoying themselves. But inside, many volunteers are monitoring themselves constantly. Am I doing this right? Am I what he needs? Is the audience watching me? If I do this wrong, will everyone know?
This heightened self-monitoring means that any signal from the performer indicating the volunteer has done something wrong lands with much greater force than the performer intends. You might mean it lightly. They experience it as confirmation of the fear they were trying not to have.
The Rule That Has No Exceptions
The rule I operate by is simple: if something doesn’t go as planned while a volunteer is involved, it’s always the performer’s fault. Always. Without exception. Before the audience, in my language, in my framing, in every visible signal — the performer is responsible for the outcome.
This is not about humility as a performance tactic. It’s about something more important: protecting the person who trusted you enough to come on stage.
In practice, this means a few specific things.
If a volunteer misunderstands an instruction, I gave unclear instructions. “Let me try that again more clearly” — not “no, not like that.”
If a volunteer responds in a way that complicates the effect, I find a way to work with what they’ve given me. Not visibly. Not in a way that calls attention to the adjustment. I adapt, continue, and the audience never knows anything needed adapting.
If the volunteer does something that the audience finds funny in an affectionate way, that’s fine — warmth and shared laughter are different from mockery. But if the laughter has any edge to it, any quality of “look what this person did wrong,” I defuse it immediately. “That’s actually a completely reasonable response, I should have been clearer” — said easily, without drama, redirecting the room’s attention back to the effect.
What Absorbing It Looks Like
This doesn’t mean accepting blame in a self-flagellating way that makes the moment about you. That’s a different kind of problem. The audience doesn’t need to watch the performer beat themselves up any more than they need to watch the performer embarrass the volunteer.
Absorbing it means responding in a way that makes the unexpected moment seamless. The goal is that the audience doesn’t see a problem at all — they see a performance that’s still in motion, still building toward something, still in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing.
Sometimes this requires genuine creative improvisation. A volunteer has done something you didn’t expect, and now you have to find a path forward that still works. This is one of the hardest skills in live performance and one of the most important. The performers who can absorb almost anything — redirect, reframe, find the version of the moment that still delivers — are the ones who can handle any room.
The performer who can only deliver the planned version of a moment is always vulnerable to the unexpected. And volunteers will always give you the unexpected eventually.
The Audience Is Watching How You Treat People
Here’s what I’ve noticed performing in different contexts — keynotes, corporate events, private functions: the audience is not only watching the effects. They’re watching how you treat the people you interact with.
This makes complete sense. We’re social animals. We read social dynamics automatically and constantly. When a performer brings someone on stage, the audience immediately starts monitoring the relationship between the two people. Are they treating the volunteer with warmth? With respect? Are they listening to the volunteer’s responses, or using them as props? Does the volunteer look like they’re having a good experience?
The performer who treats their volunteer well — who genuinely includes them, who gives them credit, who makes the moment feel collaborative rather than extractive — builds trust with the entire room. Every audience member is thinking, on some level: “That’s how I would be treated if I went up there.”
The performer who is careless with their volunteer — even mildly, even without visible malice — teaches the room that going up on stage is a social risk that might not pay off.
And rooms that feel unsafe for participation get quieter and more reluctant. You might not notice this in any single show, but you’ll feel it when volunteer invitations start to fall flat, when you make the same request you’ve always made and get half the response you used to get.
Trust is slow to build and fast to lose. How you treat people on stage is one of the fastest ways to either.
A Practice That Shapes the Habit
One thing I’ve found useful: after each show where a volunteer was involved, I review specifically what happened when anything was unexpected. What did I say? What did my body language do? How did the volunteer appear to receive it?
This review isn’t about guilt — it’s about pattern-recognition. If I can stay honest about the moments where my instinct was to self-protect rather than protect the volunteer, I can catch the habit before it takes root.
The instinct to self-protect is natural and not shameful. You’re under pressure, things aren’t going as planned, the audience is watching. Everything in you wants to not look like this is your fault.
That instinct, in the moment with a volunteer on stage, is the instinct to override. Take it. Absorb it. Make it yours. The volunteer trusted you with something fragile, and the right response to that trust is always protection, never deflection.
They came up because you asked them to. You asked them to because you needed them. You owe them the dignity of owning what happens when they’re up there.