MAGIC LANTERN SHOW
SATURDAY 19 OCTOBER, 6:30PM
TATHRA TOWN HALL
TICKETS ON SALE HERE FROM SUNDAY 4 AUGUST
FAMILY FRIENDLY!
One hundred and fifty years ago, the towns of the South East were regularly visited by travelling entertainers. Decades before the movies, they projected ‘beautiful dissolving views’ through magic lanterns powered by limelight. Audiences were enthralled as, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the dark, they experienced the suspense, pleasure and laughter of pictures painted on glass mysteriously transforming one into the other.
We use a magnificent mahogany and brass biunial magic lantern for our contemporary show. Through it, we manipulate, animate, and project authentic hand-painted and photographic slides from the period. Accompanied by musicians, performers, artists and surprise guests we will give you the same experience audiences of all ages had back then.
You will be overwhelmed by the intensely pulsating psychedelic colours generated by mechanical chromatropes. You will thrill to melodramatic stories told through word, image and sound. You will experience local history and the local environment in a whole new light. And you will personally bring back to life the 150-year-old laughter of comic slides such as Man Eating Rats where, well, a man eats rats!
Our travelling team of collaborators has previously performed at the Cellblock Theatre, Powerhouse Museum, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and many other festivals and venues around Australia. Now we have arrived in Tathra.
Martyn Jolly creatively re-uses archival photographs. In 2006 he was one of three artists commissioned to design and build the Act Bushfire Memorial. In 2015 he received an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant to lead the international project Heritage in the Limelight: The Magic Lantern in Australia and the World. Since 2015 he has developed a series of collaborative magic lantern performances around Australia. He has published widely on photography and is currently researching Australian illustrated magazines, Australiana photobooks, colonial spectacle and modernity, colonial photography, the history of Australian media art, and early Australian visual education. He is an Honorary Associate Professor at the Australian National University School of Art and Design
Charles Martin is a computer scientist specialising in music technology, musical AI and human-computer interaction at The Australian National University, Canberra. Charles develops musical apps such as MicroJam, and PhaseRings, researches creative AI, and performs music with Ensemble Metatone and Andromeda is Coming. At the ANU, Charles teaches creative computing and leads research into intelligent musical instruments. His lab's focus is on developing new intelligent instruments, performing new music with them, and bringing them to a broad audience of musicians and performers.
Alexander Hunter is a musician with Scottish, German and Red River Métis heritage. He studied composition and performance at Edinburgh Napier University and Northern Illinois University and is the Composition Convenor at the Australian National University School of Music on unceded Ngunawal and Ngambri Country. His work as a composer and performer is based on collaborative open works, which encourage a fluid relationship between composer, score, and performer, as well as other human and non-human actors. Collaborating with poets, dancers, glass artists, science communicators, magic lanternists, and others, this collaborative practice explores complex relationships via conversations about time, space, and the act of listening.
Anita Pollard was born in Bateman’s Bay, she is currently studying for a Bachelor of Visual Arts at the ANU School of Art and Design. Her work incorporates old optical toys and new visual technologies. She is interested in investigating obsolete photographic practices and the archive.