Your "First Routine"

I want to talk about, what is for me, the hardest part of the actual show.  It is not creating novel routines ,dealing with the venue, or handling hecklers; those are easy in comparison to the first “routine” that you do during a show.  I normally don’t have the benefit of either having someone who warms up the audience for me or the benefit of having enough of a reputation that people already know who I am before I even start the show.  So I have to “earn” my audience’s attention.

The traditional tactic of entertainment, and I hear this a lot from musicians, is that your first bit of material should be your second best routine.  But my response to this is now; “best at what”?   The act of performing variety entertainment, especially anything that smacks of illusion or danger,  can very easily take on an “adversarial” tone to many audience members.  They might think everything I am doing is fake or that you shouldn’t play with fire. 

In circus arts, the performers refer to those scripted moments of a show that are designed to elicit applause and cheers as “applause points”.  In illusion I have heard these moments as being referred to as “moments of amazement”.  But neither of these are really guaranteed to make the audience want you to succeed or support your successes during your show.    So your second best “moment of amazement” might only service to reinforce an adversarial tone or distant tone to those audience members.

What I focus on in this first routine is not my moment of amazement but my “moment of connection” to my audience.  I choose something that not only will make my audience laugh, applaud, or cheer but will more importantly connect “me” to them in some way.  I will sacrifice sheer awesomeness of a routine for a different one that helps create or give this “feeling” or “notion” of being connected to an audience.   This serves a number of purposes for me

1. -      It relaxes me.  The moment that I feel a crowd is supportive of what I am doing any of the pre-show stress I feel usually goes out the window.
2. -      I have a buffer zone.  I am a juggler on top of everything else; this means that I do occasionally screw up a trick.  If the crowd is supportive of me they are more likely to actively want me to succeed.  If a crowd is adversarial the act of dropping means that I lose a lot of the interest that I had built up because they were interested in seeing the “tricks” rather than the performance.
3. -      It is easier to deal with hecklers, if a crowd is more interested in me than I am doing with my hands then the crowd will be a lot less supportive of hecklers if they should pop up.
4. -      It sets the tone for the rest of the show.  Creating that moment forces me to “choose” what kind of show that I am going to do so that I don’t drift off center doing the show..
5. -      I am longer the guy “showing” off.  I am the entertainer.

What these moments consist of change depending on the individual and the type of entertainment.  I found  that making light of some of the “paradoxes” of being a juggler and an illusionist was what worked for me in this way for some types of shows that I did.  For other types of shows I have discovered other “methods” that accomplished the same thing.

Some Food For Thought