Festival of Ideas: Close-up
World Premiere
Close-up is a brief magic performance on headphones, for one spectator at a time.
Inside a working café, surrounded by unsuspecting customers, magician Vincent Gambini invites you to sit at a table and watch a 10-minute performance. In front of your very eyes, playing cards transform inexplicably and sugar cubes vanish without a trace. But as you listen to the magician’s pre-recorded voice and the sounds of the café on headphones, the line between reality and fiction becomes increasingly thin: is this a real café, or a film set filled with actors?
Combining expert sleight-of-hand with the dreamlike nature of cinema, Close-up invites you to briefly reimagine everyday life as an uncanny illusion.
Supported by Farnham Maltings and Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts.
‘This thoughtful, playful and multi-layered piece will make you question how we watch and what we see.’The Guardian (on Gambini’s ‘This is not a magic show’)
A collaboration with the University of Sussex, Festival of Ideas harnesses the transformative power of the arts and humanities to fashion new ways of thinking about the past, present and future.
