Box of Light Variety Show

Take your seats please, ladies and gentlemen, for an evening of edification and entertainment the likes of which Birmingham has never seen. Prepare to have your senses dazzled, your world turned upside down, by a triple-bill of acclaimed visual artistes… PROFESSOR HEARD’S PEERLESS MAGIC LANTERN SHOW Professor Heard is an international performer who creates optical entertainments drawing on a collection of weird and wonderful hand-painted and photographic magic lantern slides from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Frights, sights, odd stories and amazing mechanical moving images are presented on an old showman’s lantern, together with a commentary of unreliable facts and unnecessary information. For the first time in over a century, Bristol-based artist Roderick MacLachlan will recreate a Victorian experiment unveiled at Westminster Royal Polytechnic Institute in 1890. Entering a black booth, the performer uses a combination of powerful lights and mirrors to project his face onto the screen. For the evening’s climax, the stage becomes a laboratory where French artist Julien Maire will dissect and repurpose a series of cameras, turntables and projectors to create his own ingenious lo-fi visual machines. Full of off-beat boffinry and premeditated catastrophes, Open Core is inspired by the live anatomy shows of the past while also giving us a taste of what a 21st century lantern show might look like.

The management accepts no responsibility for any excitement of the senses that this event may provoke.