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Written by Sukhbir Cheema
When Christopher Allen started thinking about live cinema performances, he was creating these immersive installations in clubs doing what you would now call “Vjing” in many of London’s nightlife venues but doing it using a collection of vintage old film and slide projectors.
This was in the 90s, a time when Facebook, YouTube nor Google existed. In that pre-digital, analog period, the DJs and music producers were digging through old secondhand record collections and sampling them to make their music. At that time, this concept of “live cinema” was still a nascent idea.
It was the advent of the firewire cable in 1994 that changed everything. It brought about a democratisation and access to non-linear editing that allowed media artists such as Allen to experiment with new ways of making and exploding video production at the onset of a digital revolution.
Allen, who is the producer, director, and co-founder of The Light Surgeons, began making award-winning experimental films, animations, and music videos off the back of creating concert visuals for bands and club nights.
“I started out using very simple equipment, an analog camera, a mini-disk recorder, and began to document things and interview interesting people. Owning a digital video camera that could connect to a computer to loss-lessly edit our own material opened the doors for us to start to make our own documentaries,” said Christopher.
He told Eksentrika, how this access to film making through developments like firewire brought about an explosion of digital filmmakers and allowed a whole range of new voices and artists to experiment with moving images. Strange to think this today when everyone with a smartphone has a complete film production studio in their pocket.
In 1995, Allen established The Light Surgeons in East London with his original partner Andy Flywheel. Over the years the studio developed and grew through various collaborations with different artists, designers, filmmakers, animators and music producers. Bournemouth-based audiovisual artist Timothy Cowie joined the collective in 2005 after graduating with the same degree in Media Design at Portsmouth University as Allen.
“Over the years we progressed and diversified our practice into working with live bands on labels like Ninja Tune, Mo Wax, and Wall Of Sound, working on films and installations for various designers like Ron Arad, as well as fashion companies like Alexander McQueen, Diesel, and Boxfresh, much of our work is what you would now call “experiential” design, creating audiovisual environments for parties and launch events,” Allen says.
However, as the studio’s output grew, despite the glitter and glam of working for renowned entertainment and lifestyle brands, Allen and Cowie yearned for something more artistic and the creation of work with a more critical audience.
“Tim and I spent an awful lot of time providing visual accompaniment to other artists and DJ’s electronic music in clubs and we grew a bit jaded by the endless remixing of our material in this context,” says Allen.
The routine of gigs and commercial events work no longer provided an artistic challenge. Both artists realised they wanted to do more than just entertain. Through that creation of several experimental films and live performances they foreseen the opportunity to do something deeper, something which could move people and connect with wider audiences through the power of story telling.
The studio decided to switch scenes, from noisy dance floors and erratic promoters to the more structured setting of theatre performances, where audiences were seated down, listening, and paying undivided attention to their audiovisual live shows.
They had begun experimenting with the production of short, experimental documentary films, which mixed spoken word interviews, original film footage, photography, and motion graphics with their own DJ sets and electronic music. Through a collaboration with the festival onedotzero at the ICA in London, they also began to curate their own audio-visual club nights in which they could incorporate these films and experiments with moving images and sound. This relationship paved the way for longer, more formal works and the birth of live cinema projects like “APB: All Points Between”, their first feature-length live audiovisual performance.
Gradually, this area of their work evolved, becoming more focused, lengthier and audience members were really beginning to respond to this fusion of film, music, and live performance.
The development of their APB show with onedotzero brought this new format of live cinema to international audience. The show wove together various interviews and visuals gathered from gathered during their travels around the world into a series of capsule narratives and audiovisual compositions.
“It was just really amazing the reaction you got from the audience. Once you step over that line from providing just visual entertainment, something that was also exploring different cultures and telling stories and working directly with the music – once we became an audiovisual collective rather than just visual artists – it was just so much more interesting and exciting. We knew then that that was what we wanted to do more of,” Allen says.
Unlike traditional cinema, which presents a carefully edited and finalised version of the film, live cinema allows audience members to witness and immerse themselves in something that’s between film and a live concert where the magic of cinema, live editing, and live composting is reflecting the layers of the music and follow a story arch as it unfolds before their eyes.
This approach to audiovisual art began to expand, they began to combine it with the performances of live musicians, lighting, shadow play, and other sensory elements on stage.
As their show developed, these aspects became more timed with precision, yet, there was allows ample room for improvisation and iterations, making their art form a constant work in progress. Each live cinema performance is therefore unique event, what you saw yesterday could vastly differ from the overall experience in the next performance.
For Allen and Cowie, this cross-disciplinary medium was a stroke of genius. Drawing on years of experimental work with live visuals and music, while fusing it with a unique, poetic approach to documentary film their audiovisual art has forged a totally original, performative art form where they explore storytelling in new ways and have astounded audiences around the world.
In 2010, Allen and Cowie received an invitation from the British Council Malaysia to create a new collaborative live cinema project.
Joel Mills, British Council’s Senior Music Programme Manager, had been impressed by The Light Surgeons’ “True Fictions” project, a live cinema performance that was commissioned by EMPAC in the U.S., that wove together an elaborate multi-media story about truth and myth across the state of New York.
Joel got in touch with The Light Surgeons and suggested they might like to create a similar experience to showcase Malaysia’s diverse cultural identity.
“When we began this project we were keen to find a focus that would allow the project to connect with audiences beyond Malaysia and broadened this theme of identity into a tripartite relationship between identity, ritual, and place. We were interested in how this concept of ritual could be viewed in the widest sense, so these themes might lead us into wider subjects like ecology, economics, and our fragmented sense of identity through the internet. We were looking for subjects that would transcend one country and place, subjects that would provoke the audience to consider their human condition and place in the wider world,” says Allen.
In November 2010, The Light Surgeons visited Kuala Lumpur to start researching their landmark live cinema work “SuperEverything*”.
British Council Malaysia’s Gary Yeoh was the bridge that connected these UK artists with Malaysia’s local talents. A group comprising of visual and musical artists, leading commentators, activists, and thinkers, along with introductions to various non-governmental organisations and associations active in Malaysia.
This led them to forge many meaningful relationships with particularly Malaysian musicians and the group began to collaborate with the multi-talented composer Ng Chor Guan, a.k.a Guan, the mainly female Gamelan ensemble Rhythm in Bronze, the percussion ensemble HANDS Percussion Malaysia, and the ambient electronica artist Euseng Sito aka Flica. Alongside these musical collaborators, visual artist Fauzi Yusoff and motion graphics designer Fariz Hanapiah from the studio Motiofixo were invited into the project. SuperEverything* also benefited from the local insights and production skills of music producer Hardesh Singh and location film producers Joanna Lee, Adshrie Yap, and Didi Ramlan.
The group began work and started collecting interviews. PUSAKA’s Eddin Khoo, writer, and poet Bernice Chauly, were among the subjects who contributed their thoughts and ideas alongside climate advocate Khairun Nisa Zabidi, artist and educators Yap Sau Bin, and Lim Kok Yoong. As the project gathered pace and toured across Malaysia, younger voices were added through the engagement of students from two universities that were visited by Allen and Cowie as they gave talks on their work during their production trips.
“We made a lot of notes during this visit and spent a lot of time mapping out all the different threads and themes that we found interested in order to weave a story. This tapestry of narrative structures became our script for SuperEverything*. In fact, the title SuperEverything* was a bit of a joke that we put on our proposal to the British Council. Our plan was always to make something kaleidoscopic, something that explored a range of themes and issues – it was ambitious but something we felt we could achieve and we wanted to push ourselves to build on what we had done before,” Allen says.
Although it was a decade before the global pandemic of 2019, much of the post-production work on SuperEverything* took place on a remote basis. The Light Surgeons and their Malaysian collaborators had recorded all the visuals and sounds they needed methodically but only began their editing process once they were back in the UK. The challenge was a logistic one, how to align the vision for SuperEverything* with the collaborators being on different sides of the world. The artists from the UK and Malaysia frequently met online to brainstorm and converse. Files were uploaded and shared, diagrams and post-production pipelines explained over emails and Skype calls. This was all considered to be quite a feat at a time when broadband was not as fast and prevalent as it is today.
“This was 2010. The internet back then was pretty slow. Yet, slowly but surely, we made SuperEverything* possible,” said Guan, who was among the main Malaysian collaborators on the new musical compositions which make up SuperEverything*. Despite the geographical distance and choppy internet connection, Guan attests that the music for SuperEverything* came through spontaneity.
“We were jamming, discussing, and experimenting together. It was organic, just the way music should be,” said Guan, who played a key role in assisting Cowie in the curation of the distinctly Malaysian sounds that run through the show.
The first SuperEverything* performances were staged in Kuala Lumpur in September of 2011 in the Black Box Theatre at MAP, Publika during the KL Design Week and ran for 5 nights to packed audiences and rave reviews. However, it was not until later, as the show toured internationally and began to connect with different audiences, that the artists realised the impact of what they had created.
While the group was doing a 5 date UK tour of the project in 2013 they performed the show at the Brighton Pavillion and happened to draw an unusually large Malaysian crowd. Guan recalls this moment when he talked to people after the show and they said “they felt like they were teleported back home”
As the performance toured internationally, Allen and Cowie and the rest of the Malaysian musical ensemble were pleasantly surprised by the way it connected with audiences in other countries. They presented the piece at serval media arts festivals across the USA, performed it in Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, India, Italy, and at the famous Glastonbury Performing Artist festival between 2011 to 2018.
“We really pushed ourselves to explore many things with this show, from the musical collaborations, the way the narrative was constructed to the use of smell during the performance using incense and splices, to the exploration of audience interaction via a Twitter wall of text at the start of the show. All these things came together in a beautiful and original way. After making this project I personally found it very hard to return to our other, more commercial design work and since this project, my focus has been to continue to make artistic and culturally interesting as much as I can,” says Allen.
Allen considers SuperEverything* as “the most holistic and in-depth audiovisual artwork” he has worked on to date. He considers it a benchmark in terms of a live cinema performance work as an emerging genre that integrates all the disciplines to tell a single story.
“It’s a story with many threads and many voices but one which really moved its audiences and carried great wisdom and feeling musically,” says Allen.
Research has also become a crucial part of The Light Surgeons’ practise in recent years and Allen still remembers how he was influenced during the project by the words of Malaysia’s Eddin Khoo.
“There are so many things that the voices in this work taught me, but Eddin’s statement about the difference between “knowledge” and “information” is something that continues to resonate with me today as more and more of our cultural ideas and critical thinking is being influenced by the internet. So, much of this project remains super-topical and super-relevant in the present – I really hope we get the opportunity to perform it again in Malaysia!”
For Guan, collaborating with the two UK artists became an opportunity to explore new types and forms of sound.
“It’s important to collaborate with artists from abroad because they bring perspectives that we either ignore or don’t see. As Malaysians, we tend to take our country for granted. So when artists from abroad come, they tend to act as mirrors that reflect the blindspots we have.”
“We feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to work on this project through the British Council. I would say it is vital and an aspect of our government’s programmes that I for one am very proud of – and there’s not many I can think of, to be honest.
“I think it’s important to continue to have artists, thinkers, researchers, scientists, and people from all types of backgrounds engage in these cultural collaborations. We learn so much from each other and if we are going to continue to live in a peaceful, sustainable world we need these types of institutions to continue to support and nurture projects like this. When you think how much is wasted on things like armed weapons it’s really criminal that cultural organisations like the British Council are struggling to get the funding they need at the moment.”
Cowie echoes this sentiment, sharing that in 2022, they will be releasing the music from SuperEverything* in a deluxe vinyl release on the UK experimental label called UTTER.
“SuperEverything* is a timeless piece of work that is still relevant now. I’m proud and very excited to finally be able to share this beautiful sound track which features all the original musical scores and compositions we created for this live cinema project as nine unique tracks.
“These tracks include string compositions composed by Guan and me and performed by a trio of players from the UK’s Heritage Orchestra. We are really excited to hear people’s reactions to this album of music. It’s a beautiful cultural fusion of different styles and approaches – classical meets electronic meets Southeast Asian influences,” Cowie said.
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Cover image sourced from The Light Surgeons. This article was edited by Ista Kyra.
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