Light Field

Saffy Setohy and Bill Thompson

Participants from Hammerfest Culture School will open this years DanseFestival Barents by activating "Light Field". Come along to celebrate the opening and find out what the Northern Lights sound like!

Light Field is an off-grid participatory installation by artists Bill Thompson and Saffy Setohy exploring our relationship to light, sound, and each other. Light Field is made of constellations of light objects, people and the sound of light. You are invited to rest within, to activate, and to become part of Light Field by interacting with the objects and each other, facilitated by simple, playful choreographic invitations. Notice how Light Field unfolds and changes over time as people come and go. Come in and out of the installation space in your own time. Suitable for all ages. 

Photo: Sid Scott

Light Field’s sound score was created by converting lightwaves found within our natural and built environment – the tonal hums of street lamps and emergency exit signs cut through the pops, crackles and whistles of the Northern Lights. A multi-part sound-score is gently amplified through kinetically powered lanterns.

"I am interested in how relationships between human and non human things can emerge through the body in performance, often working with sound, visual materials and environments. I’m curious about people and place, transformation, and interconnectedness. Through making performance I attempt to listen to, speak of and ask questions about the things we can’t always express in words. I seek to frame or construct relational situations in which open-ended encounters between performance, environment and audience can happen." - Saffy Setohy

Glasgow-based Saffy Setohy works across choreography, performance, participatory work and movement direction in an expanded field. Interdisciplinary collaboration is at the heart of her work. She has made various collaborative installation, outdoor, sited, stage and screen works for rural and urban contexts, commissioned and presented in the UK and internationally. Her current practices are concerned perception, interconnection, sensation and interdependancy. She is interested in how our bodies interact with our environments and with non-human things.  www.saffysetohy.co.uk

Bill Thompson is a sound artist and composer. As an artist, he has a particular interest in perception and embodied presence. His installations and performances frequently utilize found objects, field recordings, repurposed live electronics, and digital media to create environments that encourage active attention to each moment. He applies this same strategy within his compositional work which often include long sustained tones, densely layered textures, and indeterminate or improvised structures. He has written for a range of instruments including voice, guitar, contrabass, bagpipe, percussion, organ, string quartet, mixed ensembles and live electronics. As a solo performer he works primarily with live electronics although originally trained as a guitarist. billthompson.org