The first time I performed for a large corporate audience — probably 200 people in a conference room in Vienna — I made the mistake of seeing all of them at once.
Not physically. I didn’t literally scan the room. But the psychological experience of being in front of 200 people simultaneously was like trying to hold an enormous weight at arm’s length. The sheer presence of 200 faces, 200 pairs of eyes, 200 judgments in process — it was too much. My attention fragmented. I was trying to be everywhere at once, which meant I was fully present nowhere.
The performance was functional. I got through it. The routines executed. But the quality of presence I’d had in smaller settings — the focused, genuine connection with specific people — was completely gone. I was managing a crowd instead of performing for individuals.
It took me a while to solve this, and the solution came from an unexpected source: a book on actor training from nearly a century ago.
Circles of Attention
Stanislavski developed the concept of circles of attention as a solution to a specific problem actors face: the overwhelming presence of an audience.
An actor who becomes aware of the audience watching them tends to lose the reality of the performance. Self-consciousness sets in. The actor becomes an observer of their own performance rather than a participant in it. The technical execution continues, but the inner life that makes performance genuine drains away.
Stanislavski’s solution was not to suppress awareness of the audience — that’s impossible and creates its own problems. The solution was to redirect attention to something manageable.
The circle metaphor works like this: imagine that your attention can illuminate a space, like a spotlight. The small circle is yourself — your hands, your body, a single object you’re holding. You can be fully present within that circle. You can feel everything within it, notice everything, maintain genuine engagement.
The medium circle extends to the people and objects immediately around you — the spectator you’re working with, the table between you, the small group nearby. You can maintain real connection within this circle. It requires more attention but it’s still manageable.
The large circle is the whole room. The full audience, the back wall, the complete spatial reality of the performance space. This circle is too large to fully occupy with attention. Trying to maintain presence across the whole room at once produces the fragmentation I was experiencing.
The practice is to start in the small circle and expand deliberately. Don’t begin at the large circle and try to manage down. Begin at the small circle, where genuine presence is achievable, and let the circles expand as you settle.
What This Changed
The first time I tried this deliberately, the effect was immediate and strange.
I was performing in a medium-large room — maybe 80 people. My usual approach had been to address the room as a whole, to perform “out” to the whole space from the beginning. Instead, I started the routine with my attention in the small circle: the spectator sitting directly in front of me, the cards in my hands, the specific interaction between us.
The rest of the room existed. I was aware of it in the way you’re aware of peripheral vision — present but not in focus. But my attention was genuinely with the spectator and the objects. I was actually there, in the way I was actually there in hotel rooms when I practiced alone.
What I noticed was that the performance quality improved immediately. The genuine connection with the spectator was real, not performed. The attention I was giving to the specific interaction was full and present, not spread thin across 80 simultaneous judgments.
And paradoxically, the rest of the room felt it. An audience watching a performer who is genuinely present with a spectator gets to experience that presence vicariously. The intensity of real connection is visible from the outside. A performer who is managing the whole room at once transmits exactly that — management, not connection.
The Specific Mechanics
In practice, the way I use this now:
The small circle activates immediately when I begin any routine that involves a specific spectator. My attention goes to that person completely. The room becomes background. The interaction between me and this particular human being is the whole world for the duration of this routine.
I find specific things to genuinely notice about the spectator. Not to perform noticing — to actually notice. Their particular way of holding the object I’ve given them. Whether they seem nervous or relaxed. What their face does when they realize something is about to happen. This specificity keeps the attention in the small circle because there’s always something real to attend to.
When I’m between routines — addressing the room as a whole, transitioning — the circle expands. I’m genuinely present with the whole room, not managing it. The difference is that I’m moving from the established foundation of the small circle outward, not trying to start at the large circle and hold it.
And the large circle — when I’m genuinely addressing 200 people at once — I’ve learned to find specific faces rather than trying to cover the room. Three or four specific people at different points in the space. My attention moves between them. The room sees the performer making eye contact with specific individuals, which creates the impression of connection even when each of those moments of connection is actually genuine.
The Solitude Framing
The title of this piece uses a phrase that sounds paradoxical: solitude in public.
But it captures something real about how this technique actually feels from the inside.
When I’m in the small circle with a spectator, the rest of the room drops away in a specific way. Not forgotten — I’m still managing the performance — but not present as an audience of 200 simultaneous judgments. The room becomes a background condition rather than a foreground pressure. And in that state, something like solitude becomes possible: the quality of focused attention that hotel rooms at midnight used to produce.
The hotel room practice was always in solitude. The attention was naturally singular because there was nothing else to attend to. The cards, the sequence, the thing I was trying to understand — that was the whole world. Learning to reproduce that quality of attention in public, in front of a room full of people, was the actual challenge.
Stanislavski’s circles gave me the tool. Start small. Be fully present where you are. Let the rest of the world be background while you are genuinely here.
The audience doesn’t need you to be aware of all 200 of them simultaneously. They need you to be genuinely present with whoever is in front of you right now. That genuine presence broadcasts. It fills the room.
But it starts small.
It always starts in the small circle.