KMA’s most ambitious work to date, Congregation will be the world’s first ever ballet designed, choreographed and composed entirely for pedestrian performers. There will be no rehearsal and no textual input: participants will simply respond to the choreography of light and sound in an embodied, rather than verbal, discourse. The score for Congregation has been created by Portland-based composer Peter Broderick.

Commissioned by SCAN and British Council, Congregation is due to premiere simultaneously at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai as part of World Expo and Bournemouth for the Inside Out Festival, followed by further performances at Tate Britain, London

Congregation illuminates the responses that humans make to interruption and interference in their environment. The interruption, in this example, is the arrival of a lone figure (The Angel). This figure cannot communicate, can barely move and appears powerless. Despite its impotence, the figure is utterly immovable, indelible, and as such must be perceived as super-human, with an authority and permanence as powerful as any force of nature. If it will not adapt, it demands to be acknowledged; and the witnesses of the arrival must establish a relationship with it. Our human need to believe – to attribute meaning, to understand our environment – leads us to make extraordinary attempts to relate to this enigmatic presence, and we fall quickly upon universal patterns of religion, spirituality, faith. We seek affirmation in sharing these beliefs with our neighbours, and attempt to reduce and distill the mystery into something tangible. Communities form as consensus develops, and factions seek to confirm their specific relationship with the visitor by defining their differences from each other.

And what then becomes of us should this visitor depart? Are we willing to accept that what seemed permanent was merely an apparition – that we were fooled, and foolish – or was the power in the shared experience sufficient to outlive the trigger? Will we miss our visitor, or rejoice in the reaction which was catalysed? Was the act of the moment more telling than the subject?

Tom and I head off to Bournemouth on Tuesday to begin work creating KMA’s latest (and greatest…) work, Congregation. Pretty much all of June will be taken up with the work’s development (the small matter of World Cup watching notwithstanding), and will include a mad dash to Shanghai to look at a potential space for the work’s performance there in September.

Patchy bloggers, at the very best, we’re going to make a concerted effort to keep making regular updates to this page as development and travel progresses…

It’s always been difficult capturing our work on camera – the pieces are created to be experienced rather than observed – but it’s especially difficult with a project as challenging as last year’s Great Street Games. On the second and third nights of the performance, I drove up and down between Gateshead, Middlesbrough and Sunderland trying to capture some moments from each venue on camera. That was straightforward enough, but it was when I tried to put together the footage into some kind of meaningful document that I hit a brick wall. I couldn’t work out how to get across both the immediacy of the interaction in an individual venue, and the sense of networked community that was created by the event. So I gave up. But yesterday, I came across this footage again, and decided that the best thing for it was just to put a brief collection of shots together and let it speak for itself. Yes, it’s confusing, requires more explanation, and will probably prompt more questions than it answers: but there it is… If I work out how I really should put together a document from all this footage, I will do so, but until then there’s this on vimeo.

KMA became the first contemporary artists to be commissioned to create a new work for the National Railway Museum. Taking inspiration from the museum and its collection, they created a large LED sculptural interpretation of the relationship between time and distance, and how it affects the journeys we make and the people we meet.

Projected light and thermal-imaging technology were used to create jaw-dropping interactive playing arenas in which human movement triggered spectacular light effects. The games took place simultaneously in three North East UK locations; Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough. Each area competed against the others in this world-first event.

The games were set out of doors, in large urban spaces, with no pre-prepared participants. The scale of the arenas created a vast aesthetic impact on the urban environments in which they were placed, drawing audiences to them, quite often by chance as people went about their daily lives. Curiosity drew people in, but it was the intelligence of the language within these games which held the public attention and engaged them in problem solving, play and social engagement.

By manipulating time and space within the public arena and blurring the distinction between participant and audience, KMA’s work is opening up vast new environments in which art and audiences meet equally on each other’s terms.

Some video footage from Great Street Games is available here

5circles is a radical, imaginative, and beautiful global project that aims to fundamentally transform the relationship between artist, performer and spectator in urban public art.

Developed from principles established by KMA, 5circles builds on their successful public interactive light works in a new collaboration with Pilot Theatre to celebrate 2012. An inaugural performance was held in York in October 2009.

Strange Attractors (The Anatomy of Dr Tulp) opened in Liverpool in September as part of the inaugural Abandon Normal Devices festival.

The piece is an exploration of relationships and spaces, using the audience as the subject matter, creating an impromptu choreography formed as a response to the natural enquiry and playfulness of the public.

There’s more information and some video from the opening night here.

This one on top of FACT in Liverpool as we set up Strange Attractors, which opens on Wednesday.

We’re delighted that our 5Circles2012 project (in collaboration with Pilot Theatre) has been shortlisted for Artists Taking The Lead.

Part of the programme for the 2012 London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, Artists Taking The Lead is a commissioning programme that will create 12 major new works of art for Britain. We’re one of five shortlisted artists from the Yorkshire region who will be presenting to the panel before a final decision is made in mid October. All in all, 59 artists across the country were shortlisted from over 2000 applications, so we’re very excited to be part of this select group.

5Circles2012 is a project that will see five large circular stages in five Yorkshire cities – creating giant urban light playgrounds. Each circle will host a series of interactive games and public art installations, with a projector suspended above the ground which will react to the movement of the people within the space. Through this, people will have a unique interaction with light, sound and the other participants. The project will be accompanied by an interactive website, allowing people to create and programme their own sequences in the circles. It will be rolled out from five cities to five countries to five continents up to 2012, spreading across the world from Yorkshire.

To keep up-to-date with project news, please visit out 5circles2012 project pages.

GREAT STREET GAMES

In October 2009 KMA will create a large scale outdoor kinetic light work that links the three UK cities of Gateshead, Middlesborough, and Sunderland via a real-time physical game. Great Street Games, commissioned by The Great North Run, will be a massive, participatory, socially inclusive, high-tech athletics tournament. The world-first event will take place simultaneously across the three cities over a four day period. See www.greatstreetgames.org.uk for more information.

5 CIRCLES

Earlier in October 2009 KMA in collaboration with Pilot Theatre will launch 5 Circles in York, UK.

Over the next three years 5 Circles will grow into a radical, imaginative, and beautiful global project that aims to fundamentally transform the relationship between artist, performer and spectator in urban public art.

More very soon…

FLOCK IN CHONGQING, CHINA

In November 2009 KMA will take Flock, their interactive pedestrian version of Swan Lake, to Chongqing in China.