Yes, people have been telling actors to “break a leg” for hundreds of years, but not for the reason you may think, according to Rebekah Lazaridis in the video below. An actress since the age of 12 and a painter of stage sets, Lazaridis has created an art exhibition at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture exploring the most familiar theatrical superstitions — why you cannot whistle in a theater, or say the title of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” and what a ghost light is for, and why actors blame Thespis.

Entitled “Broken Legs” — she gets around to explaining that too — Lazaradis created all her art works using discarded theatrical scenery. “Each piece is painted in black and white on old tattered black velvet theater curtains (also known as ‘legs'”) — !! “They are then spliced (broken), skewed and reoriented, then stitched back together transforming into an entirely new image.”