Light Night

These days I spend the majority of my time in Bournemouth, where I’m studying at university. For the last few years I’ve bemoaned the sparse quantity of creative events taking place in the area, so I got very over excited about the new Arts Bournemouth festival, Arts by the Sea.

The festival itself is made up of more than 50 events in and around Bournemouth, spread over 6 weeks. One of the main focuses is Light Night, an evening of events, installations and performances taking place around the town centre, inspired by the Nuit Blanche concept that has taken off in major cities around Europe.

The Greatest Travelling Vaudeville Show in the World

We took a trip into town in the afternoon to observe some of the happenings, and straight away we came across a bizarre contraption in the middle of Lower Gardens. It turned out to be the “Greatest Travelling Vaudeville Show in the World”, quite a lot to live up to for 3 over excitable actors and a rickety stage on wheels. The half hour show was certainly whimsical, and wouldn’t have looked out of place on the streets of Edinburgh Fringe, but I did feel it was slightly lacking in something. If I’d been 8 years old it probably would have been more on my level but the toilet humour and musical comedy were a little too simplistic to keep all ages entertained. The set itself was quite impressive, something between a sultan’s litter and a 1950s caravan, with cubby holes and curtains transforming each side into the next part of the performance. We stayed for the whole performance, despite our reservations, then wandered off to examine the other sights around town.

Boscombe Vintage Market comes to Bournemouth

As part of Light Night the exhibition space in Lower Gardens had been taken over by the stalls from the monthly Boscombe Vintage Market, with all their lovely retro treats and knick-knacks. Here are a select few of my favourite things:

why did i not think of this?

Electric Hotel

One of the major features of Light Night was the Electric Hotel, a dance performance in a temporary structure built next to Bournemouth Pavilion. The concept was a surreal take on voyeurism and our collective fascination with people watching, with the audience observing the goings on of the “hotel” through the windows and hearing the narrative through headphones.

The performance was formed around a repeated cycle of people going about their day to day lives in a bland but slightly surreal hotel. Each cycle  focused on a different room of the hotel, and the lives and private fantasies of it’s occupants. As it progressed, the pattern of events changed, and actions began to have different consequences each time.

The monolithic temporary structure has already been taken to the Big Chill and Latitude festival before it’s appearance at Arts by the Sea, and it was the this that piqued our interest in the event to begin with. Great pains were taken to ensure the set, (made from a number of over-sized shipping crates), appeared as realistic as possible, right down to the fire extinguishers on the walls and the fully operational “hotel bar” underneath it.

Although I would never consider myself a fan of contemporary dance, I was interested in the way technology had been used in this performance. Until recently I had only thought of wireless headphones as a novelty, reserved for silent discos, but they are opening up a world of possibilities for the performing arts and the Electric Hotel was an inspired use. Despite the fact that we were all listening to the same thing, hearing it on your own makes the whole experience somehow more intimate, adding to the slightly uncomfortable sense that you are witnessing something you shouldn’t be. A performance of this scale would obviously not be possible without them, but even if noise pollution wasn’t an issue I think the feeling of it would have been very different.