Audience Management 101 for Emcees

Any stage act or performance will involve an audience. That’s the whole point of the act. Performers know this, and a lot of them react to the audience when they are on stage.

For example, in a dance routine, the dancers cannot move out of their formation to interact with the audience. However, the choreographer usually plans the dance to have certain ‘wow’ points that are most likely to get a reaction from the audience, or at least keep the audience engaged.

Still, wondering how the audience reacts on stage makes a lot of performers nervous. They cannot break the fourth wall to interact with the audience directly. And truth be told, the audience can react in totally unexpected ways – this includes total silence.

That’s where you, the emcee, come in. As the person with the ability to interact with the audience directly, it is your job to manage the audience for the entire event.

You control the audience, not the other way around

Effective Emceeing: Don’t be an Awesome Parrot on Stage

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 54 seconds. Contains 580 words

As an audience member, have you ever heard an emcee on stage introduce or close an act by describing it as “Awesome”?

That dance performance was … Awesome!

Up next we will have an act that is simply … Awesome!

That accounting presentation was so … Awesome!

Based on these, it seems like everything is “Everything Is Awesome”.

‘Awesome’ is an awesome word, and there is nothing inherently wrong with it. However, people have a tendency to keep using it over and over on stage. It boggles the mind, that of all the words in the world, people choose to use ‘awesome’ as the word to repeat. Maybe it rolls off the tongue better, or maybe it seems to be more impressive than just a simple ‘good’ or ‘great’. Either way, the “one-word-to-describe-it-all” problem is still the same, and it is most definitely not awesome.

The problems of the parrot

Among my group of emcee friends, we’ve begun referring to people who use the word ‘awesome’ to describe everything,  as “Awesome Parrots.” It’s a nice nickname (it sounds awesome!), but it’s also something you want to avoid being.