Choosing Your Spectator/Assistant
Let’s assume you’ve won your audience over in the first thirty seconds with a warm, witty, informative, properly-structured introduction. After thirty seconds the audience likes you, they’re intrigued, they’re relaxed and comfortable. What next? Tricks? No. You first have to really “connect” with one person in particular.
Obviously you must perform for the entire group, making eye contact and warmly extending yourself to each of them in turn. But, to start, you have to choose one person in particular to participate in the performance. It will fall to this person to “pick a card,” or “take a look at this string,” or “lend me a $100 bill please.” The choice of who you will initially “play to” is very important; it often makes the difference between a “so-so”, show and an “o my god I don’t believe it what’s your phone number” show.
Before you can decide who you want to perform to, you have to ask yourself, “What characteristics do I want a spectator-assistant to have?” Some performers work best with quiet business types, some with psychotic drunks. I like to work with and intimately interact with someone who is respectful, uninhibited, and attractive, in that order. It’s nice for people to watch you interact with someone who is attractive; but it’s much more important that the person is going to, first, extend to me the same respect and consideration I extend to them; and second, that the person is feeling good and is willing to have some fun. These people are a joy to work with, and they participate in creating an exciting, dynamic performance.
If you keep your eyes open, you’ll often find that these people don’t wait for you to find them, but actually “reach out” to you during your introduction. They’re easy to spot, if you look for them. They meet your eyes with a warm, curious, and confident look; they don’t quickly hide their hands below the table as soon as they realize that a close-up performance sometimes involves a spectator holding onto something; they will rarely speak to you first, but once you talk to them they freely open up.
These people are most often women. That women usually make better assistants is a simple fact, and not sexism, for the following two reasons, one small and one big. The small reason is that because you are probably a male performer and, I hope, relatively charming, it follows that there is often going to be a special kind of chemistry between yourself and a member of the opposite sex, especially with the heightened emotional situation of a performance. The big reason is that given the values and customs of our culture, women tend to not only have better communication skills than men, but are also more emotionally expressive than men, if only because men, in general, have this ridiculous notion that being sensitive and emotional is not masculine.
Even when you have learned how to best pick an assistant, there will be times when an assistant will be an exceptional part of – or perhaps steal – the show, and times when they bring your show down a bit. How to acquire the most control possible over which case it will be is another important topic; the start is picking the right people. Once you have chosen an assistant, you should work throughout your performance on creating a special relationship with this person.
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