There’s a casting director at every performance. Most performers just don’t realize that’s one of their jobs.
When I first started performing at corporate events, I arrived at venues about forty minutes early. This was practical: setup time, sound check, walking the stage, making sure everything was where it needed to be. Useful, necessary, and entirely focused on the technical and logistical side of the show.
At some point I realized I was using the pre-show time for everything except the thing that would most directly determine whether specific moments in my show worked: getting to know the audience.
Not all of them. Not in a comprehensive way. Just enough to identify the four or five people in the room who could be excellent on stage — and to have already established enough of a rapport with them that the invitation, when it came during the show, would land as a natural continuation of something that had already started.
The Problem with Random Selection
There’s nothing catastrophically wrong with looking at a room, finding someone who looks willing, and inviting them up. This is how most volunteers get selected, and it produces adequate results much of the time.
But “adequate” is the ceiling of random selection. You might get great. You’re more likely to get fine. And occasionally you get difficult, and you spend twenty minutes of a forty-five-minute show managing a volunteer situation that a ten-minute pre-show conversation could have predicted and avoided.
The deeper issue is that random selection treats the audience as undifferentiated — as if any willing person would be roughly equivalent as a participant. This is empirically wrong. Some people have exactly the qualities that make a great volunteer: responsiveness, ease with uncertainty, a natural quality of openness to what’s happening. Other people have qualities that complicate volunteer work: need for control, performance anxiety, reflexive need to be funny at the wrong moment.
These qualities are not hidden. They’re visible in conversation. The only question is whether you’re having the conversations.
What Pre-Show Scouting Actually Looks Like
I arrive now with two objectives: technical setup and people work. I do both simultaneously, or sequentially, depending on the venue. Sometimes I can set up and then move through the room. Sometimes I have a technical team handling the former so I can focus entirely on the latter.
The people work looks, from the outside, exactly like being a personable host. I move through the pre-show space — cocktail area, foyer, wherever people are gathering — and have brief, genuine conversations. I’m not interrogating anyone. I’m not running a visible assessment. I’m just talking.
But I’m paying attention to specific things.
When someone says something I respond to with a slightly unexpected observation, how do they handle it? When I ask a question that requires a brief creative response, how fast and how genuine is their answer? When I introduce a small moment of playfulness, do they play along or redirect toward something safer?
I’m looking for people who are spontaneous, present, and comfortable with mild uncertainty. These are the qualities that translate directly into being a good participant on stage.
The Conversational Investment
There’s something else the pre-show conversation provides that goes beyond assessment: it creates a relationship.
When I invite someone on stage who I’ve already talked with, I’m not inviting a stranger. I’m inviting someone I’ve connected with, however briefly. And from the stage, the invitation can reference that connection — a glance that acknowledges we’ve already met, or an actual verbal callback to something we spoke about.
This changes the dynamic significantly. The volunteer who comes up because they feel they already know the performer a little bit arrives in a different psychological state than the volunteer who’s been cold-selected from the crowd. They’re not more performatively related to me — the connection is real. And that ease shows.
More practically: the audience sees a performer who clearly knew who they were inviting. Not in a staged or manipulative way, but in the way that reveals someone who’s attentive to the people around them. This builds trust with the whole room, not just with the volunteer.
Who You’re Looking For (and Who You’re Not)
The ideal volunteer, assembled from years of pre-show conversations: someone who responds genuinely rather than performing for me, who’s curious about something, who has at least a mild quality of playfulness, and who is comfortable not being in control of a conversation.
That last one matters most. The person who needs to steer every conversation toward familiar ground is the person who will, on stage, try to steer the effect toward familiar ground. This creates friction with whatever the effect needs to do, and that friction is visible to the room.
Conversely, the person who can comfortably follow a conversation somewhere unexpected — who can respond to something odd with “I don’t know where this is going, but let’s find out” — is the person who creates magic with you rather than working against it.
I’m also paying attention, in passing, to who’s a natural talker and who’s quieter. Both can work. The natural talker can be great — they’ll engage more freely and the exchange will have more energy — but they can also overwhelm a moment if the effect requires focused attention. The quieter person might need slightly more encouragement to engage, but their reactions are often more genuine and visible.
Neither is better in the abstract. Both require different handling. Knowing which you’re about to work with lets you calibrate.
The Invitation As Continuation
When the moment in the show arrives to invite someone up, it plays differently when you’ve already met.
The invitation can be specific: “I want someone from over here — you, actually, we were talking earlier about concentration, which is exactly relevant to this.” Or it can just be a directed glance toward someone you’ve already established connection with. Either way, the audience sees a performer who has been paying attention, who has a reason for the selection, and who is making a considered choice rather than a random one.
This specificity, even when it’s subtle, reads as competence. It tells the room that the performer is running a show, not hoping a show will happen.
And for the volunteer, being specifically invited — chosen, rather than selected — feels different. They arrive on stage already engaged, already part of something, rather than being extracted from the safety of the crowd and placed in an unfamiliar situation.
The Wider Benefit
Here’s something I didn’t anticipate when I started doing this: pre-show conversations improve shows in ways that go beyond volunteer selection.
They give me a feel for the room’s energy before the show starts. They tell me something about the cultural dynamics of the group — how formal or informal the atmosphere is, what kind of humor will land, whether the crowd is in a celebratory or a working mindset. They help me calibrate my opening before I walk on stage.
The forty-five minutes I spend in setup and conversation before a show now reliably produce better shows than the forty-five minutes of pure technical setup I was doing three years ago. Not because the technical elements matter less — they matter a great deal — but because the audience is not technical. They’re people. And the more I know about the specific people in the room before the show starts, the better the show is for those specific people.
Arrive early. Talk to everyone you can. Cast your show before the curtain rises.
The best volunteer in the room is already there. Go find them.