LOVE AND LIGHT

BY CAROLYN LAU
ON BEHALF OF THE PRODUCERS AND PARTICIPANTS OF TLS09


The seeds for The Light Show 09 (TLS09) were sown about a year ago whilst www-surfing, ogling amazing light creations made from found objects and recycled material by people from all corners of the world. From thinking ‘We Need Some Of That’, to ‘We Can Do That’, we became inspired to walk our talk and mount our own light show. Serendipity at play that the word ‘light/to light’ carries positive connotations everyone could use.

Some of us were already making lights out of discards so finding like-minded people to join us was difficult only when it came to limiting the number of participants. It quickly became clear that we had (traditionally) disparate design disciplines on board: object/spatially-driven architects and emotive/experiential/ephemeral-driven theatre-lighting designers. Add one interactive multimedia artist, one artist who instinctively uses found objects as his preferred medium, and a film-maker, and TLS09ers make for an interesting mix.

Finding material to work with was easy. People throw away so much. Coupled with energy efficient lamps, the green label sits comfortably on some of what we have created for this show. Regardless, we hope to enable others to find aesthetic value in all things discarded and to expand perceptions of lighting and of found material.

Any interaction between different disciplines is rewarding, and particularly so the Performing Arts with Design. A dance response to the end results of our lights/installations, choreographed by Aida Redza and performed by dancers with passion, to music by Hardesh Singh is the absolute icing on the cake for us.

It has been a good journey, with much love and light moving us along. But love and light alone is scarce enough these days to mount any show – so our deepest gratitude to our generous sponsors and supporters for enabling us to realise TLS09.

If we earn a few brownie points along the way promoting the mantra Reduce-Reuse-Recycle, all well and good. If TLS09 manages to inspire future light/found object shows then we would have achieved our quiet goal of contributing creatively towards Malaysian Design.