Light Brigade

The Light Brigade is an independent group of loosely affiliated artists. We are designers, writers, choreographers, composers, visual, media and performance artists whose mission is to forever change the way our fellow citizens see and relate to familiar places in their everyday environment.

We plan, design and execute creative time-based, site specific interventions on the local landscape and built environment using the full assortment of tools our consortium members possess: dance, lighting, illusion, visual and sonic media, augmented reality, poetry.

The Light Brigade’s work is in the hacker tradition, interrupting the normal flow of events, subverting expectations, disrupting thought-patterns-as-usual. But unlike our brothers and sisters in the digital world, our interventions take place in real time and in three-dimensional space.

The Light Brigade does not permanently inhabit, occupy or create physical space. Rather, we honor nature, community and the human spirit by bringing art to new audiences, activating public and natural spaces, and inspiring people to re-imagine what “place” is and how they relate to and understand it.

The four core collaborators of the Light Brigade staged our first intervention in 2009—a thirty minute dance performance based on a text by one of the Light Brigade Core Four—on and within an iconic downtown Anchorage architectural landmark, the art deco JC Penny’s parking garage.

We recently got back together when the Anchorage Museum challenged us to create another downtown site specific performance, this time on the space-age glass and metal façade of the new museum renovation designed by the internationally acclaimed architect David Chipperfield. We accepted.

This new work: "Project 2013" starts with a series of smaller scale “gestures” designed to demonstrate the range of artistic experimentation our members are capable. This series of interventions will feature the elements first experimented with in our debut piece such as industrial and architectural lighting, an original musical and sonic soundscape, projections, choreography, text, along with the addition of a major new element—urban aerial dance. The series will culminate in a grand finale performance on the Museum on the Fall Equinox, September 21, 2013.

Maintaining our artistic focus on the subjects of time, light and darkness—themes of special interest to Northern dwellers—we will place our boldest dancers in specially designed rigging and free them to explore the boundaries of the possible by inverting the world and making the vertical exterior skin of the museum their stage, demonstrating to Anchorage residents that the sky is, in fact, not the limit.

Please follow us along our journey's path....