The Lantern Company in partnership with Liverpool City Council and many other local organisations, produced our first 3-day Luminous Landscapes Festival of Light and the Environment in the beautifully restored Liverpool Festival Gardens. The event sold out with audiences of over 10,000. Held on this former city landfill site, we worked with a brilliant local, national and international team to create a beautiful trail of illuminated artworks, puppets, performance, live music, sound scapes and installations which led the audience on a journey through the woodlands, waterways and pathways of the gardens. Taking the environmental mantra of Reduce, Re-use and Recycle as our guiding principle, the event celebrated the awesome power and beauty of the natural world and warned us of what we stand to lose if we don’t look after our world properly.
We also held lantern making workshops for local communities and families at venues across the city, with those who took part becoming part of the whole experience, by bringing their hand made lanterns to add to the event.
The event was a culmination of 12 years of the Lantern Company’s work to date, and also celebrated the partnerships that we have made with local colleges, arts organsations and theatre companies over this time, as well as new collaborations. In keeping with the recycling theme, the festival included work by many artists and technicians who have worked with the company over the years, much of it up-cycled for this event. A huge thank you everyone involved in making such a special event happen.
Luminous Landscapes was funded by Arts Council England, Liverpool City Council, Granada Foundation, Your Housing and Merseytravel, and a crowdfunding campaign.
Photographs by Mark Loudon and Mark McNulty
Download the programme here (pdf)
