There’s a performance I think about regularly. Not because everything went smoothly — quite the opposite. A corporate event in Vienna, maybe three years in, and a volunteer who was determined to be difficult.
Determined is maybe too strong a word. He wasn’t hostile. He was the kind of person who, when selected from an audience, defaults to a performance of skepticism. Arms slightly crossed. Answers that were technically compliant but had an edge of “let’s see if you can really do this.” The energy of someone who had decided in advance that this would be an opportunity to demonstrate that they couldn’t be fooled.
My old response to this kind of volunteer would have been management. Steering. Finding the path through the routine that minimized the disruption his energy introduced. Making his resistance smaller so my script could continue as designed.
What I did instead — and this is the Keith Johnstone lesson landing in real time — was treat his skepticism as an offer and say yes to it.
Blocking and Accepting
The foundational insight of improvisational theatre, as Johnstone articulates it, is that scenes are built through acceptance and die through blocking. When an actor blocks — denies, deflects, refuses to engage with what their scene partner has introduced — the scene stalls. The energy collapses. The audience can feel the resistance.
When an actor accepts — treats whatever has been introduced as real, as a given, as something to build on — the scene moves. Each acceptance creates new possibility. The “yes, and” principle isn’t just a warm creative philosophy. It’s a practical instruction for keeping forward momentum alive.
Blocking, in the theatre context, is literally saying no to what your partner has offered. But Johnstone identifies subtler forms: changing the subject, making a non-sequitur response, ignoring what was offered in favor of your planned line. These are all forms of blocking, and they all kill scenes.
The magic application is direct. Every audience response, expected or otherwise, is an offer. The question is whether you block it or accept it.
The Vienna Volunteer
When I accepted the skeptic’s offer that night in Vienna, I named it. Not confrontationally — warmly. Something like: you’re watching for something specific here, and that’s exactly right, watch closely because this is the part where I need you paying the most careful attention.
I made his skepticism a feature. I recruited it as an asset. The routine was, in effect, for him more than anyone else in the room.
His energy shifted. Not immediately — but over about ninety seconds, his posture opened, the arms uncrossed, and by the end he was the most invested person in the room. The others in the audience, who had watched his skepticism transform, were more invested too. They’d watched a story happen. There was a character arc, in miniature — the skeptic becomes the believer, or at least the engaged participant.
If I’d blocked his skepticism — steered around it, managed it, reduced it — that character arc wouldn’t have existed. The routine would have proceeded and concluded. The audience would have seen a trick performed well. Instead they saw something more like a scene.
The difference was entirely in the choice to accept the offer.
What Blocking Looks Like in Magic
Blocking is extremely common in magic performance and usually goes unnoticed because it’s invisible — you see the result of the block, but not the alternative that was refused.
A spectator makes an offbeat comment during a routine. The performer smiles briefly and moves on. Block.
A volunteer gives an answer that wasn’t expected and slightly derails the planned narrative. The performer takes it technically into account but doesn’t acknowledge the humor or the personality in it. Block.
The moment of astonishment, when it comes, produces an expression on the spectator’s face that’s worth ten times any planned moment — and the performer doesn’t acknowledge it, just moves to the next effect. Block.
None of these blocks is obvious. In fact, many performers consider this kind of tight focus on the routine a sign of professionalism. Stay on script, don’t get derailed, keep control.
But each block costs something. It tells the audience: your responses are not part of this. You’re a viewer of something that’s already scripted. Your contribution — your personality, your humor, your genuine reaction — is not welcome as material for the show.
That’s a less interesting dynamic than the alternative.
The Risk of Yes
The obvious objection to treating every audience response as an offer and saying yes: some offers are bad. Some volunteers offer chaos or hostility or genuine disruption. You can’t just say yes to everything.
This is true, and Johnstone is not naive about it. Acceptance is not the same as abdication. The “yes, and” principle doesn’t mean you have no preferences and no direction. It means you take what’s offered and build on it, steering through acceptance rather than through resistance.
If a volunteer offers hostility, you don’t accept the hostility — you accept the energy and redirect it. If a volunteer offers chaos, you find the element of the chaos that serves the performance and build on that. You’re not passive. You’re active within an accepting framework rather than active within a controlling framework.
The difference is significant in practice. Control through resistance tends to create tension that reads to the audience. Control through acceptance tends to be invisible — the audience just sees a conversation that happens to be going somewhere.
Building Improv Capacity
One consequence of the yes-and approach is that it requires you to be more comfortable with improvisation than most scripted performers naturally are.
If you’re deeply committed to a specific version of your routine, every deviation is a threat. The audience response that’s slightly off-script becomes a problem to be solved rather than an offer to be accepted.
If you’re comfortable enough with the material to be flexible about its execution, deviations become opportunities. The unexpected moment becomes the most memorable part of the show.
Building this comfort takes time and specific practice. I’ve spent time doing entirely improvised presentations of effects — not performing them, but practicing the skill of responding to fictional unexpected responses. Training the reflex to accept before evaluating.
I’ve also found that accepting more in performance, and experiencing the results, has been its own training. Each time I said yes to an unexpected offer and it worked — which is most of the time, because audiences are mostly trying to participate, not to disrupt — the next yes became easier.
What Gets Created
The performances I remember most vividly from my own experience — not the technically cleanest, not the most impressively constructed — are the ones where something unexpected happened and I accepted it and built on it.
Those moments have a quality that planned routines, however well-executed, don’t fully achieve. They feel like something that only existed in that specific room, with those specific people, in that specific moment. Because they did. They couldn’t have been planned, because they emerged from real contact between the performer and the actual people in front of him.
That irreplicability is one of the things that makes live performance different from recorded entertainment. The accidental, responsive, unrepeatable moment is not a flaw in the medium — it’s the point.
The yes-and principle is how you make space for it to happen.
The see-saw of status, the acceptance of offers — both of these require something we haven’t talked about yet: a sense of the space around you, an expansive awareness that allows you to catch what’s being offered before it passes. Johnstone has a specific concept for this that maps precisely onto stage fright and how to counter it.