London pushes into a new immersive market

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When Vogue magazine unveils a grand London fashion show next month, it will be unusually democratic. Rather than an elite group of celebrities and insiders being seated on the front row, anyone who pays £25 will be able to stand and watch it projected on the high walls of Lightroom, a huge subterranean cube in King’s Cross.

Vogue’s Inventing the Runway is a collaboration with Lightroom, an immersive venue that launched in 2023 with David Hockney’s Bigger and Closer. Lightroom then added The Moonwalkers, a space show narrated by Tom Hanks. The latest show uses Vogue’s archives to tell the story of the runway from couture salons to today’s theatre.

Lightroom is trying to widen immersive entertainment beyond art shows to other media, drawing in the worlds of fashion, music and sport. Spectacular shows have spread around the world, many inspired by the Atelier des Lumières in Paris and its Van Gogh, Starry Night show. But their financial future, and the boundaries of the medium, remain uncertain.

“It is still an interesting puzzle,” Richard Slaney, Lightroom’s chief executive, told me after I’d seen (and heard on its enveloping acoustic system) the Hockney show. It was created with the British artist, who narrates his career and how he works. “I thought, ‘This is the place for me’,” Hockney recalls as sunny images of Los Angeles float by.

Immersive art has faced setbacks since shows of artists such as Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh became a craze after the pandemic (helped by Atelier des Lumières being featured in the Netflix drama Emily in Paris). Lighthouse Immersive, a Toronto company that took shows such as Immersive Frida Kahlo to 21 North American cities, filed for bankruptcy protection last year. 

But the phenomenon is still growing in London. Lightroom has had 500,000 visitors and Frameless, a 30,000 sq ft space near Marble Arch featuring Gustav Klimt and Edvard Munch displays, has been joined next door by Moco Museum. Moco is the third outpost of a gallery in Amsterdam and Barcelona, and has immersive displays, along with works by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

London hosts many crossovers between art and digital entertainment. Infinity Mirror Rooms by the artist Yayoi Kusama ran for three years at Tate Modern, while Abba Voyage, the Swedish band’s avatar show, is still going. (A plan to build a British version of the Las Vegas Sphere was blocked last year by London’s mayor Sadiq Khan.)

Fashion has also become immersive: the British designer Es Devlin, who creates sets for bands including U2, has worked on shows for Louis Vuitton and Yves Saint Laurent. She has designed sets for National Theatre plays such as The Crucible, and worked with Superblue, an immersive space in Miami.      

Lightroom is part of a theatrical tradition. Its backers include Nicholas Hynter and Nick Starr’s London Theatre Company, which runs the Bridge Theatre, and Sir Leonard Blavatnik’s Access Industries, which also invests in television and theatre. It has a dramatic streak, aiming to make shows with a narrative, not flat displays.

West End theatre is among London’s competitive advantages as an immersive production hub. “This is a sweet spot for experimentation and technology. It is very good at being agile, it has an amazing creative economy, and other territories can be very expensive, especially the US,” Slaney said.

Lightroom relies on the artist or narrator being alive to tell the story. That makes the experience personal (“It is like going to a gallery with the right person holding your hand,” Slaney said). It also means that the company can build its own intellectual property (or IP shared with others, as with the Vogue show) to keep exploiting.

Danny Cohen, president of Access Entertainment, said it aimed to create “new content, new art, new experiences, rather than reproducing something”. The marginal costs are lower than live entertainment since it requires no performers and fewer backstage staff. Each show runs repeatedly in London and at venues such as Lightroom’s space in South Korea.

But the initial cost of building a library is high. Although it made a small profit in 2023, Lightroom is raising £3mn of new capital to fund international growth and the creation of new shows. Vogue is bringing fashion to King’s Cross but Lightroom must hope that immersive entertainment is more than a passing fad.

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