I came across Henning Nelms’s work the way you come across most genuinely useful things in magic study: sideways. Someone mentioned his name in a context I wasn’t expecting, I followed the thread, and then spent a week reading with the specific uncomfortable feeling of encountering ideas you wish you’d found earlier.
Nelms was a playwright and theater director who turned his attention to conjuring — and the result is the kind of book that only someone with a rigorous theatrical education could write about a field that often lacks one. He thinks about magic the way a dramatist thinks about plays, and the crossover produces insights that are still, decades later, not common knowledge in the performance community.
The one that has stayed with me most persistently: entertainment occurs only while interest is rising.
Not High. Rising.
This distinction seems minor until you sit with it for a moment, and then it becomes one of those ideas that reshapes how you look at every show you’ve ever watched.
A sustained high plateau of interest is not entertainment — it’s maintenance. The audience is engaged, they’re present, they’re attending. But they’re not being entertained in the active sense. Entertainment, in Nelms’s framing, is a dynamic phenomenon. It requires movement. Specifically: upward movement.
You’re entertained while the tension is building, while the stakes are escalating, while the effect is developing toward something you don’t yet know. The moment you’ve reached the top — the moment of arrival, the reveal, the climax — you begin to descend. The interest that was rising plateaus and then, unless something new starts to rise, begins to drop.
This is why the minute after the applause is the most dangerous minute of a show. You’ve arrived. The interest peaked, the audience responded, and now you need a new trajectory or you’ll begin to lose what you just built.
The High Note Trap
Most performers, including me for a significant stretch of my early performing life, think about shows as sequences of peaks. Get to the first high moment. Get to the second. Get to the climax. Connect them with whatever gets you from one to the next.
The flaw in this model is that it prioritizes peaks over trajectories. It treats the destination as the point and the path as connective tissue.
Nelms’s principle inverts this: the path is where the entertainment actually lives. The audience is most engaged not when they’re at the top but when they’re rising toward it. The climax is the satisfying arrival, but the journey is where you hold them.
This means that the quality of a show depends less on the quality of your peaks than on the quality of your escalation. How well do you build? How consistently does each moment feel like it’s going somewhere? How clearly does the audience sense, even without being able to articulate it, that something is developing?
What Flat Feels Like
Once you have this principle internalized, you start seeing flatness everywhere in performance — and in your own work.
Flatness is not the absence of effort. You can work extremely hard, demonstrate impressive material, produce technically excellent effects, and still have a flat show. Flatness is what happens when the interest curve isn’t climbing. When each moment feels complete in itself rather than leading toward something. When the show is a collection of events rather than a developing experience.
A flat moment is any moment where the audience isn’t leaning slightly forward into what’s next. Where they’re satisfied with what they just received rather than hungry for what’s coming. Satisfaction is wonderful after a show ends. During the show, too much satisfaction at any given moment means the interest curve has peaked.
The counter-intuitive implication: your strongest effects should not necessarily be staged as the fullest, most complete moments in the show. They should be staged to create maximum hunger for what’s after them — even if what’s after them is just the moment of absorbing the impact. Orlop, buildup, consequence. Rising, peak, release. Then new rising, higher, toward the next.
Applied to a Forty-Five Minute Show
When I redesigned a keynote-plus-magic piece I perform at corporate events — somewhere around forty-five minutes total — I stopped asking “where are my peaks?” and started asking “where is the interest curve rising?”
Mapped graphically: the interest curve should be predominantly upward-trending across the full duration, with brief descents (moments of lighter material, audience recovery time, transitions) that set up the next rise. The descents aren’t mistakes; they’re necessary. You can’t sustain pure ascent any more than you can sustain a single held note forever. But descents should be shorter and shallower than ascents, and each new rise should reach slightly higher than the previous one.
What I found when I applied this map to my material was that I had two or three genuine high-quality ascent sequences and several flat stretches where I was neither ascending nor descending — I was simply sustaining. These flat stretches were not obviously wrong. The audience was engaged. The material was fine. But the interest curve wasn’t moving, which meant I wasn’t entertaining — I was maintaining.
Fixing the flat stretches didn’t require new material. It required redesigning the sequencing and framing of existing material so that each element was positioned as a step toward something rather than as a complete entity.
The Practical Question
The question Nelms’s principle makes available for every moment in your show is simple: what is this moment building toward?
If you can answer that question clearly — if there’s a concrete “toward” that this moment is moving toward — the moment has trajectory. The interest curve is rising. You’re entertaining.
If the honest answer is “this moment is complete in itself” — if there’s nothing it’s building toward — then the moment is a plateau. It might be a wonderful plateau. The audience might be deeply satisfied by it. But you’re not ascending, and ascending is where the entertainment lives.
Stage moments as steps, not as destinations. Let the destination arrive, absorb its impact briefly, and then begin the next ascent immediately. Never let the interest curve rest for long.
Nelms figured this out as a playwright. It applies with equal force to a forty-five minute corporate keynote, a fifteen-minute closeup set, and every performance form in between.
The entertainment isn’t at the top. It’s in the climb.