Recently, I’ve been going to Science and Cocktails, a series of popular science lectures in Freetown Christiania. The atmosphere is great fun, but I’ve been finding the lectures themselves a bit underwhelming. It’s mostly my fault, though.

There’s a problem, common to all types of performing artists. Once you know the tricks that make a performance work, you can’t un-see them. Do enough theater and you can’t help but notice how an actor interprets their lines, or how they handle Shakespeare’s dirty jokes. Play an instrument, and you think about how they made that sound, or when they pause for breath. Work on action movies, and you start to see the wires.

This has been happening to me with science communication. Going to the Science and Cocktails lectures, I keep seeing the tricks the speaker used to make the presentation easier. I notice the slides that were probably copied from the speaker’s colloquiums, sometimes without adapting them to the new audience. I notice when an example doesn’t really fit the narrative, but is wedged in there anyway because the speaker wants to talk about it. I notice filler, like a recent speaker who spent several slides on the history of electron microscopes, starting with Hooke!

I’m not claiming I’m a better speaker than these people. The truth is, I notice these tricks because I’ve been guilty of them myself! I reuse slides, I insert pet topics, I’ve had talks that were too short until I added a long historical section.

And overall, it doesn’t seem to matter. The audience doesn’t notice our little shortcuts, just like they didn’t notice the wires in old kung-fu movies. They’re there for the magic of the performance, they want to be swept away by a good story.

I need to reconnect with that. It’s still important to avoid using blatant tricks, to cover up the wires and make things that much more seamless. But in the end, what matters is whether the audience learned something, and whether they had a good time. I need to watch not just the tricks, but the magic: what makes the audience’s eyes light up, what makes them laugh, what makes them think. I need to stop griping about the wires, and start seeing the action.