Mirror

Schweigman & Mosk, at Open, Norwich, part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival 12.

Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 19 May 21012.

This show asks two questions – ‘how strange can reality be?’ and ‘how real is reflected reality?’ The answers are extremely strange and not particularly real.

From the off, the audience of just 30 is divided into two, to sit on long benches gazing into a dark tank through a slit window along each side of a rectangle. Everyone close together in an intimacy, an exclusivity as if for comfort while sharing the weirdness.

Noises, glimmers of lights and a sense of movings, births and contortions come from within the structure. It’s not unlike waking from a nightmare about having a nightmare to discover it’s a nightmare.

It takes time before we realise that what we have been watching is not reality, but the mirror image. It’s unsettling, yet touching in the way it unsettles life’s certainties.

Ideally set in the cavernous old banking hall of Open, talented acrobats play games with reality, exploring spatial awareness.

What’s it about? It’s about foetuses in a womb, animals, people, love, death, puzzlement, manipulation of people as if puppets, gymnastics, deceptions of water, images of life and a total sensory experience all in one hour! Amazing.