Go Toward the Light: LightNight 2014

One of our chief aims here at The Skinny is to shine a torch on the great creative events happening in the Northwest that might go unnoticed by those who don’t have an eagle eye on the region’s cultural scene. Liverpool LightNight, however, cannot be missed. Rather than hide its light under a bushel, om 16 May it releases it across the city, dazzling unsuspecting passersby with its multitude of happenings. Now in its fifth year, it has become a key event in Liverpool’s cultural calendar, bringing a wide range of the city’s artists and performers together for a luminous night of creative expression.

“So many of these arts organisations are here all year round,” says Charlotte Corrie of Open Culture, the festival’s producers, “and LightNight is an opportunity for them to show themselves off to new audiences, try out some new things and just have a real play.” Liverpool’s architecture and civic spaces become metaphorical and literal canvases for the street events (all of them free) happening throughout the night. The Churchill Way flyover gets a photon makeover from 10pm as Friends of the Flyover invite lighting designers to transform the eyesore into a light installation, while over at Ropewalks Square, glitch artist Antonio Roberts turns the space into a digital control panel of dancing light. “Throughout the night people move between the various venues taking part,” says Corrie, “and that’s why we like to try and create some animation on the streets between those venues.”

One of LightNight’s key sound and light animations, Sound Battle, will be on the move throughout the night. The event sees The Kazimier art collective go head to head with The Harlequin Dynamite Marching Band four times at four different locations across the city (on Church Street, outside Tate Liverpool, outside Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral and outside the Anglican Cathedral). “It’s a clash of sounds,” says The Kazimier’s artistic director Laura Brownhill, who’s heading up the project. “The band is split in two halves, with a central point that will be like a base station. Half of the band is drums, and the other side is horns.”

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"LightNight is an opportunity to try out some new things and just have a real play" – Charlotte Corrie

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Like many events throughout this year’s LightNight, Sound Battle nods to the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. Using sound to light technology, the instruments are synced up to panels that link together to create a ‘dazzle ship’. One of WWI’s most curious and eccentric warfare techniques, dazzle ships were battleships festooned in a jazzy camouflage of elaborate geometric decoration that made their range, speed and headings difficult to estimate. “The idea is that the two halves perform a musical retort where they are battling against each other with sound, and there’s a whole light display that comes when each of the instruments make music,” explains Brownhill. “So when we come together as a complete group the panels that are surrounding our bodies and instruments all shape together to create the illusion of a dazzle warship.”

The most heartening aspect of LightNight is that it encourages idiosyncratic partnerships: artists and venues that wouldn’t normally fit together find the freedom to collaborate under LightNight’s creative banner. “Trying to use interesting collaborations is an important part of it,” notes Corrie. For example, PZYKSONG sees Liverpool Psych Fest let some of the leading names from the psychedelic underground set their anthemic drones and mesmeric strobes loose in the grand surroundings of Liverpool Anglican Cathedral, with choral singers lending support. “It’s a way to make people think about a space differently or engage with something absolutely new,” adds Corrie. “It might open their eyes to something that they didn’t know was on their doorstep. That's one of our key straplines: ‘do something different on a Friday night.’”

Scanning through the programme, there’s plenty that’s different: from shotokan karate workshops to a candlelit vigil through the labyrinth that is Blackburne House. There’s also a late-night celilidh and a chance to see a fire performance from the Bring the Fire Project, who describe the event as “a cutting edge performance comprising live drumming, extraordinary fire costumes and installations with a mixture of stylistic elements taken from Japanese traditions.”