Lightwaves 2015 a movement-sensitive celebration

Lightwaves 2015 is in its first full week at Salford Quays/Media CityUK. A free digital light festival, it celebrates UNESCO's International Year Of Light. It is, in its entirity, a must see and experience! In collaboration with Quays Culture, dance theatre company Company Chameleon opened the festival with an exciting choreographed response to Mad Christensen's installation Cathedral of Mirrors. One of three major installations by international artists, situated in The Quays' public spaces. The art work consists of a number of tall electro columns containing circles within strips of small bulbs that light up several different colours, in streams, when they sense movement. It is open to interaction every day (excluding Christmas Day) until the 27th December, along with the other festival works and workshops.

Lightwaves brings together the international, the local, the permanent, the fleeting and all members of the public, as a seriously accessible Manchester festival. Company Chameleon's short performance reflected these themes and values, visually in the artwork itself, playing with the ripples of colour and shape that can be created in Christensen's piece.

The half hour work was loosely divided into two parts, engineered by two minimal electronic music tracks played from a portable amplifier. One slow 'movement', one fast, a small troop of dancers responded to the temporary yet rooted art in a freestyle fashion, suggesting a loose and organic, perhaps largely improvised framework of choreography, with moments of clarity and synthesis between dancers in sensitive duets. Fusing contemporary, contact, and street dance styles, Company Chameleon embraced not only the art form around them, but nodded towards the intention of the art work(s) in the festival. These are enlightened and enlivened by 'contact' with individuals and ensembles [the public].

A small crowd gathered around Cathedral of Mirrors to watch a combination of gritty urban concrete and sensual dance and lights to open the festival. Public installations that are well worth a visit if you're in the city, and will no doubt attract an international audience over the festive season.