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The City of London, particularly in the darks days of January, can be awfully grey. Grey skyscrapers, grey suits, grey pavements, grey skies... you get the gist. But at the end of this month, there’s a brand new festival arriving to inject some colour into the financial district.
‘Vibrance’ will light up Roman ruins, medieval churches and secret gardens across the Square Mile on Thursday January 29 and Friday January 30 from 5.30pm until 8.30pm.
Created by Guildhall Production Studio, it brings together more than a dozen artworks and live performances by emerging artists from Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
Guildhall Yard will be illuminated with a series of different large-scale projections; St Gile’s Cripplegate will host an something called an extended reality installation, which combines sound, light and virtual reality (VR) technology to create an otherworldly effect; St Alphage London Wall and Garden, meanwhile, will host live music performances merging opera and electronic music.
A stone’s throw away, there’ll be a sonic installation at Salters’ Garden which will guide visitors down a route with speakers hiding in the greenery. Finally, Milton Court will come alive with visual lightworks that organisers say will reflect on ‘inner-city life and its impact on the human experience’.
The whole thing is completely free and there are no tickets needed – just turn up and wander around the kaleidoscopic light and sound scapes to your heart’s content.
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