About

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Inside a café in Gateshead, surrounded by unsuspecting customers, you are invited 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 performer's 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 magic with the dreamlike nature of cinema, Close-up invites you to briefly reimagine everyday life as an uncanny illusion.

Close-up continues Gambini's enquiry into magic, exploring how the illusion of impossible events can shine a light on questions of performance, perception and constructed realities.

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