Exercise: The High-Status Trick

In Keith Johnstone’s High-Status Trick Presentation, performers run on stage, bow, announce “Trick!”, bow again, and leave, all with confidence and delight. The trick can be anything, yet the audience still applauds. Why? Because what they respond to is status, energy, and connection.

Fake it till you make it, not as deception, but as a creative principle. When performers move with assurance, their bodies tell their minds, I belong here. Assertiveness, posture, and rhythm shape how both the performer and the audience experience presence. People respond more to tone, gesture, and openness than to literal meaning. When we play with high energy, generosity, and audience awareness, we transform performance into shared delight. 

The exercise is simple. Beneath its humor lies a study of how confidence, attention, and relational awareness shape communication. It’s not what you do, it’s how you inhabit it. Johnstone’s game reveals that status and self-belief are transmitted physically before a single word is spoken. When a performer enters with presence, the audience’s perception adjusts, attuning to the performer’s energy and emotional tone. An expansive, open posture can raise confidence and affect how others perceive authority. Acting “as if” can unlock “as is.”

Johnstone instructs players to know their audience and to offer friendship signals through eye contact, smiles, pauses, and shared timing. When a performer looks at the audience with warmth, the audience’s brains mirror that openness. Communication becomes co-regulated. In improvisation, the performer’s awareness is the content. The “trick” is irrelevant; the connection is everything.

For Bridges Impro, this exercise resonated. When words fail, status behaviour, posture, gaze, and pacing become the bridge. The audience reads confidence as coherence, even across language barriers. Practising the High-Status Trick reminds us that in a multilingual ensemble, communication is not the exchange of perfect sentences but the mutual recognition of intention.

The exercise trains the art of presenting with conviction before certainty. In teaching, leadership, or everyday conversation, we often wait to feel ready before expressing ourselves. Johnstone flips that logic: act ready first. The feeling follows. 

“Any trick will do, as long as the build-up is good.” — Keith Johnstone.

— Peter Frankl