Mirror, Mirror, Rules Apply – You Pay to Look, Not Question Why.
🎭✨ MEDIA RELEASE — Smoke and Mirrors ✨🎭
“Mirror, Mirror, Rules Apply – You Pay to Look, Not Question Why.”
Behind the velvet curtain, beyond the lights, past the stage names and the fantasy, lies something truer — and far more human.
Smoke and Mirrors is a visceral new theatre work debuting at the 2025 Anywhere Festival, blurring the lines between performance and reality, power and vulnerability, love and survival.
Inspired by real-life experiences from within the stripping industry, this bold and intimate work lifts the veil on a world that is too often glamorised, judged, or misunderstood.
Set within The Fox’s Tail, a fictional strip club pulsing with neon, sweat, and secrets, the show invites its audience into a world that dances between illusion and truth. It’s not voyeurism. It’s a reckoning. Through monologue, movement, and a genre-blending soundtrack of blues, funk, lo-fi, and EDM, Smoke and Mirrors explores the dualities of feminine performance — the show we put on, the selves we protect, and the power we take back.
Meet London, the seasoned dancer who moves like she owns the room — because she does. Vixen, the all-seeing hostess, equal parts myth and mentor, who keeps the club spinning from behind her dazzling smile. Bunny, the new girl, seemingly naive, soft-voiced, but learning fast how the game is played. Rico, the manager who thinks he’s doing a good job — but doesn’t realise the rot starts at his feet. Clint, the regular who pays more than most, thinking it earns him something real. And Lenny, the newcomer, trying to understand a place where everything is surface and nothing is simple.
These are characters — but their stories are stitched from truth. Every scene, every moment, every glint of glitter is drawn from the lived experiences of the women who’ve worked behind the beaded curtains and beneath the spotlight.
Smoke and Mirrors is about femininity and fragility, agency and artifice. It’s a challenge to the gaze, and a reclamation of voice. It’s fierce, funny, and heart-wrenching, and a love letter to the women who dance, who hustle, who survive — and to the ones who never got out.
Performance Dates:
🗓 19th and 20th of July 2025
📍 Hosted at The Pole Gym
🎟 Part of the 2025 Anywhere Festival
MEDIA ENQUIRIES:
JJ Jones – Co-Writer and Director of Smoke and Mirrors
📞 0424 153 506
📧 smokemirrorshow@gmail.com
