Control the Playing Field

"Move over here, you'll get a better view."

I recently had to explain this to a young man. In one of his videos he showed himself doing a card trick at a bizarre distance from his audience. He repeatedly insisted he was trying to accommodate people to his sides, though none were visible. As a result, it was very difficult to tell what was going on. It's an all too common mistake of amateur magicians and even some professional ones. They forget that as the performer, you are in control of the situation. At least, you should be.

Robert Greene once wrote in "The 33 Strategies of War," "Instead of trying to dominate the other side's every move, work to define the nature of the relationship itself." Most performances are very reactive to the audience rather than the other way around. How much better would it be if you were in control of the very situation itself so that you needn't worry about the reactions?

This is challenging, but by no means impossible. A big part of it is simply refusing to play on other people's terms. A schoolyard bully will seek out any victim he can, but they all inevitably encounter one who give as good as he gets. My brother was such a case. In grade school, there was one bully who gave him a lot of grief, but two incidents in particular changed that. The first was when the bully tried to pin my brother to a wall, so my brother placed a strong kick in the boy's most open and vulnerable spot: the groin. The second time was at a school recital. The bully was standing behind my brother on the bleachers the student chorus was using, jabbing him in the back of the head through the whole show. At the conclusion, as the students were filing off the bleachers, my brother wheeled around and punched the kid in the chest so hard it actually knocked him down several rows of seats to the stage floor. In front of the whole assembled audience of parents and grandparents and the entire class. After that public humiliation, the little parasite never messed with my brother again.

You don't need to be overly aggressive to get this dynamic going however. It's simply a matter of making sure people understand that you know what you're talking about. You have experience. You have authority. You have expertise. And even if you're not a 20-year veteran of the industry, fake it till you make it. I know some people abhor that phrase, but forget them.

More often it all starts with something simple. "Move over here, you'll get a better view." Those eight words are some of the best in crowd control you'll ever learn. People will accept your word as authority if you establish from the outset that you are the expert.

And example that comes to mind is Mystery Science Theater 3000. When they were first picked up by Comedy Central, then the Comedy Channel, they were flown in and shown the offices where the channel worked. They were trying out a concept of a stage surrounded by offices and cubicles to streamline communication. Joel and crew saw this was a terrible place to work, but knew they couldn't say that out loud. Instead they said things like, "Oh, you're ceilings are only 12 feet high? That'll never work. We have guys in puppet trenches." The bosses at the Comedy Channel had never done anything like MST3K before, so they just took the Best Brains crew's word for it. After a little negotiating, Best Brains set up their own office in their hometown in the Midwest. Away from the main hub of the Comedy Channel, they had more freedom to do as they pleased. And being coastal natives, the bosses only flew in to check on Best Brains a couple times a year. Even then, whenever they arrived, they would rent giant SUVs and only stay for a couple days because they had heard all the jokes about Midwest weather and were terrified of being snowed in.

With that level of autonomy, Best Brains had the freedom to do pretty much whatever they wanted. They had completely gamed the system by changing the playing field. It was no longer about the Comedy Channel trying to do things their way. Now they were suddenly at risk of losing programming their fledgling channel really needed.

This also works on tough spectators. I once had a girl burning my hands. I was running out of things to say and knew that the pacing was going to be ruined if I didn't do something. As I spoke, I kept lowering my hands to about waist level. I trailed off in mid-sentence when I looked at her, then pretended to follow her line of sight. I moved my hands a little as if to follow her gaze to my groin, rolled my eyes, snapped my fingers at her and said, "Hey! My eyes are up here, honey." She blushed, but she was laughing. So was everyone else. I had completely reframed her attitude to the audience. In that off-beat moment when no one was paying attention to my hands, I was able to get the move done. And she was none the wiser.

One of the greatest masters of this principle is Uri Geller. He would move people about however it suited him, always endeavored to appear on his terms and his terms only, and never broke character. The latter especially was useful in affecting the audience-performer dynamic. Every time a spoon bent or a compass moved he had the same attitude of, "I have no idea how this happened, but I'm pretty stoked that it did!"

A less controversial example would be Docc Hilford. When he goes to a party, there are people who will say, "Hey, there's this woman who wants to see some of your mind reading." To which he will reply, "Great. Tell her I'm over at the bar." It's all on his terms.

Learn to start altering the relationship between you and your audience, and you'll never stress out over reactions ever again.