Yeondoo Jung
Cinemagician

Yeondoo Jung¡¯s new theater piece, Cinemagician, aims to recreate the tensions between the magician and audience that arise from watching the unfolding of an unknown event or trick. Inspired by the nineteenth-century French filmmaker George Melies, whose experiments as a magician and cabaret illusionist led him to play with special film effects such as the ¡°stop trick¡± (stopping filming, substituting something in front of the camera for something else, and then resuming filming), multiple exposures, dissolves, and hand-painting colors on film, Cinemagician will present a live ¡°happening¡± juxtaposed with a projected one. As a live magician (South Korean celebrity Eungyeol Lee) manually constructs the setting of the stage that he is standing on, a camera will simultaneously shoot the stage, and project its feed on a screen hanging above. As the performance progresses, the version shown on the screen will drift from a strict live feed to one transformed by illusions only possible in cinema, leaving the audience to oscillate between the ¡°suspension of disbelief¡± and a paradoxically ravishing spectacle.