Instructions for a Seance

Instructions for a Seance is an interdisciplinary performance party. Shimmering between DIY seance, historical re-enactments and personal memoir it is one woman’s investigation of Harry Houdini, ambition, obsession and motherhood. Wickedly funny, strange and haunted these seances are a chance for a group of people to gather in the dark, to practice suspension of disbelief and to witness transformation.

For the last five years, playwright and theater maker Katie Bender has been obsessed with the escape artist Harry Houdini and his archives at The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas. Initially drawn to Houdini by the metaphor of escape he embodied, her research uncovered a man made of paradoxes; he dedicated himself to studying magicians and mystics of the past, but spent his last years lecuturing against the danger of false psychics. His success was built on gathering crowds to watch him escape, but he never understood the spiritual power these acts had on audiences. Houdini publically shamed mediums, often young woman, whom he labeled “witches” and “frauds” while working to elevate male magicians through the creation of a magician’s guild. Notoriously difficult to work with, the quintessential “art monster” Houdini dilegently wrote his mother every day and insisted on caring for her throughout his life. Houdini’s archives are rife with ambition, self-aggrandisement, mysticism, sketicism, artistry and famililal responsibility. Katie is a mother and feminist, as well as an artist. Her interest in Houdini forced her to grapple with the gendered bianary we put on “art monster” as well as our current skepticism toward historically gendered qualities like pasivity and self-sacrifice. Instructions for a Seance plays fast and loose with American traditions of seance and magic show, performing escape to liberate the audience.