Obscura – Byron Perry

Overview

Due to the extreme weather Sydney has been experiencing, Carriageworks and Force Majeure have regretfully had to cancel the season of Byron Perry’s Obscura. This work, where a large scale camera obscura is created, is unfortunately at the mercy of the elements, which have not been kind to the artist.

Light enthusiasts, you'll like this one. It turns out there's a happenstance large-scale camera obscura inside Carriageworks, and Byron Perry of Force Majeure (the dance theatre masters responsible for Culminate and Double Think) is using it in his new site-specific dance work, Obscura.

The camera obscura brings the outside world inside, upside down. It's astonishing enough to witness the phenomenon on its own, let alone when there's a dancer interacting with it. After his first encounter with a camera obscura, Perry says he became obsessed with "the realisation that the air around me was thick with criss-crossing streams of coloured light all passing through the same space and not distorting or blocking each other."

In Obscura, he interacts with and manipulates all of this as he dances, a system of shutters, mirrors and lenses shaping the small stream of natural light. Sounds cool, right? Each performance is limited to 30 places — all that'll fit into the black box environment — so get your tickets quick.