SMOKE & MIRRORS
Remounted for Café Concret #32
Montreal, QC @ Studio 303
December 15th, 2018
Following the Moving Parts Symposium!
Written & Choreographed by Erin Hill
Created & Performed by Kelly Keenan and Rebecca Rehder
Sound design by Simon Labbé
Set Design by Enrico Garzaro
Video documentation by Nina Vroemen
"Let there be a chamber wherein no other light comes, unless by the door or window where the spectator looks in. Let the whole window or part of it be of glass, as we use to do to keep out the cold. But let one part be polished, that there may be a Looking-glass on both sides, whence the spectator must look in. For the rest do nothing. For what is without will seem to be within, so clearly and certainly that they will think they see nothing but truth."
- Giambattista della Porta, Magia Naturalis, 1584
A duet for sound and silence, dancing and stillness, dreaming and waking up, light and darkness, illusion and apparition, voice and speechlessness...
Smoke and Mirrors is a dance performance that uses magic as a lens to ponder the gap between what is seen and what is taken for granted, what is felt and what is known, between synchronicity and control. Departing from the idea of "willing suspension of disbelief", coined by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817 and fundamental to Western theatre throughout the 19th century, Smoke and Mirrors asks: what is the gap between the suspension of disbelief and belief itself? Through magic and the theatre, Smoke and Mirrors attempts to choreograph belief, finding where it is activated and where it is lost.