Four Easy Ways to Build Audience Rapport
I could have titled this article “Don’t Hide from your Audience” or “Reach Out to Your Audience”, and it could have meant the same thing as the title above.
Some Filipino magicians are puzzled why they struggle to make a connection with their audience. For them, rapport building seems like concrete bridge building—formidable and impossible to do within the 45-minutes performance time.
I had the same problem before, until I began reaching out to my audience instead of receding into my little world behind the music, behind the microphone stand, behind the table or, horrors of horrors, behind the lectern.
If you want to improve the impact of you performance, reach out to your audience, don’t hide from them.
Here’s some ways how:
Stop the music and talk. Music is a beautiful theatrical tool to enhance your performance. But if you use it as a shell to hide in, or as a shroud to prevent your personality from shining through, then music can be a hindrance toward building audience rapport.
Stop the music in some parts of your program. Talk to your audience for a change. Let them know more about your personality by the way you speak and through the content of your speech. Are you funny, serious, endowed with depth, having fun? Let them know not by action alone but also by speech.
Don’t hide behind your props. You may have with you onstage monstrosities you call props or illusions. You may even have dancing girls clad in skimpy dresses to make the male part of the audience drool. Or adorable rabbits to make the children scream.
If you hide behind them thinking these are enough to entertain people, surprise, surprise!, you are right. The large illusions and props will dazzle the audience; the half-naked girls will make the boys sigh; and the rabbits will make the children delirious with excitement.
But how about you, the performer? How do they feel about you? Do they find you entertaining? Or forgettable?
You might just as well send them catalogs containing pictures of magic props, or show them the latest issue of Playboy magazine, or give them a copy of a primer on how to raise rabbits. That would probably have the same effect as your show.
Step toward the edge of the stage. When performing onstage, stay most of the time downstage center. Most theater people know that is the part of the stage that commands the most attention, as opposed to upstage. Not content to be on the edge of the stage, I often ask the organizer to arrange the seats so that the first row is just a few feet from the stage. I always insist that there is no barrier (like large speakers or a dance floor) between me and the audience.
Don’t hide behind lectern. The lectern can serve as a barrier between you and the audience. Thus it is a natural refuge for nervous, unprepared speakers. The lectern shields them from the audience’s prying eyes. It also guarantees a ho-hum performance.
In a magic performance, magicians don’t usually perform behind a lectern. However, there are stage fixtures (and semi-fixtures) that produce the same lectern-type effect. Avoid them as you would avoid lecterns and pulpits.
That means not spending too much time behind a table, microphone stand, or props. Move around a bit on stage. Spending too much time behind an object will make you a part of the background. As you well know, backgrounds don’t command attention after five minutes of observation. When you recede into the background, as surely as the word surely, the audience will stop paying attention to you.
Reach out to, not retreat from, the audience when performing your magic. Stay away from shields, remove the barriers, move toward the audience, and position the audience as near to the stage or performance area as possible, and you will notice a mark improvement in your audience connection.
Stay magical,
Leodini
Well taken and thank you very much! Great article!