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It’s been a decade since his death but David Bowie remains as great a presence in London as ever: the V&A’s David Bowie Centre opened to the public last year, it’s recently been announced that his childhood home in Bromley will be turned into a museum, and a lavish posthumous archive release campaign came to its head just a few months ago with final set I Can’t Give Everything Away.
Lightroom in King’s Cross specialises in spectacular, specially made immersive films that are screened all over its floors and walls by its ultra high-powered projectors. Subjects so far include the work of David Hockney, Vogue magazine, and the two movies that currently remain in the repertoire: The Moonwalkers, a film about the Apollo landings by Tom Hanks, and Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs, which is pretty much as you’d imagine.
Frankly, Bowie is a no-brainer for similar treatment: his epochal sense of style and theatre, heavily documented life, and peerlessly banging catalogue lend themselves perfectly to an all(ish)-senses film.
And so it is: new immersive film David Bowie: You’re Not Alone will debut at the Lightroom from April.
Featuring no narration other than Bowie’s own voice, we’re promised You’re Not Alone ‘is both a multimedia spectacle and an intimate and revealing self-portrait’, that will dip deep into the vaults of the Bowie Archive in New York to both bring us closer to the man and to showcase some of his greatest live performances. Like all Lightroom shows, it’s designed to play on loop, and will be divided into themed sections including ‘theatricality, spirituality, songwriting and the transformative power of creativity’.
It’s directed by Mark Grimmer, who led the design of the V&A’s David Bowie Is exhibition and went on to direct David Hockney: Bigger & Closer. Quoth he: ‘It says something about our relationship with artistic heroes that we're drawn to mystery, otherness, the alien... In Bowie's case, this is our construct, not his. Throughout his career, Bowie repeatedly resisted being figured as anything but human. Rather than undermining his mystique, we designed a show to celebrate Bowie as a champion of human creativity - focusing on the message he expressed time and again: that art, in all its forms, is our best hope for understanding what it means to be alive.’
David Bowie: You’re Not Alone is at the Lightroom, from Apr 22. Tickets are on sale now, costing £25 adults and £15 concs.
The best immersive theatre shows to see in London.
Plus: I went to the V&A’s new David Bowie Centre in east London.
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