LightNight is back on Friday 17 May 2019 and Open Culture are looking for artistic proposals to form the programme.
LightNight is the city’s free one-night arts festival, shining a spotlight on Liverpool and celebrating the world class cultural offer in the region. Over 100 organisations collaborate annually to create an inspiring trail of events for a diverse audience of around 15,000 people.
This open call has two strands: in-kind programming and late openings, and paid artist commissions (funding dependent).
Programming & Late Openings
Deadline: midnight, 21 Jan 2019
For this strand, Open Culture are inviting artists, arts/heritage organisations, venues and community groups to submit special events and activities to be part of the festival in-kind.
They’re looking for events including everything from concerts, exhibitions, hands-on workshops and dance to street performance, theatre and talks, to form part of the wider festival programme alongside newly-commissioned works.
To be part of LightNight 2019: Ritual please read the brief here.
Once you’ve read the brief please submit your event proposals via the online form. All applications will be reviewed and you’ll be informed if your activity has been accepted as soon as possible after the deadline. If accepted, you’ll be asked for your marketing copy and images in February 2019.
If you’re representing a venue that hasn’t taken part before, you can call Open Culture on 0151 478 4928 or email christina@culture.org.uk before submitting.
Artist Commissions
Deadline: midnight, 5 Nov 2018
Open Culture are also looking to offer commissions to individual artists or collectives (£1 – 3k) for a small number of new works to be presented at next year’s festival.
Proposals are welcome across all artforms including visual arts, performance, spoken word, technology, installation, light art or any combination of these.
For more information about applying for a commission, read the full brief here.
2019 Theme: Ritual
A ritual is a structured series of actions, performed in a particular order using specific objects, words or movements. Rituals of all kinds, ancient and modern, are seen in cultures from all over the world; where there is community, there is also ritual.
Humans construct rituals for all manner of reasons; for celebration, comfort, ceremony, catharsis or spiritual belief. From the individual to the collective, personal or public, ritual permeates every facet of our lives. Some allow participants to have a transformative experience, mark a personal change, or explore spiritual beliefs. Even in the everyday – how we greet each other, mark anniversaries, dance together – there is a deliberateness, a choice, in ritual that offers significance beyond a simple action.
For LightNight 2019, we will consider ritual as a universal phenomenon, spanning the breadth of human history, and also as an artistic process by which we shift our state of mind. Ritual offers us an active and creative process by which to create shared meaning, understand the world and define, and transcend, our place within it.