Blacklight Illusions

After ­playing around with all that glowing party stuff for Miss Chu’s birthday, we were excited to discover that Gardens By the Bay was hosting a special blacklight (UV light) Lion and Dragon dance performance for this year’s Chinese New Year celebrations! So of course, we went down to watch. Unsurprisingly, the event was extremely crowded and we couldn’t get anywhere near the stage. We had to settle for a side view through the bushes.

The Chinese Lions and Dragons had gorgeously intricate neon costumes, which glowed beautifully under the blacklight and made for a visually striking show.

Yet the stage seemed oddly over-lit and altogether too bright to really maximise the full effect of the glow. Nevertheless, we left inspired, and decided to experiment with some blacklight performing of our own at home!

In theory, blacklight theatre offers the ability to control visibility / invisibility by making everything you want visible UV reactive, and everything else, pitch black. You can get pretty creative with props and choreograph interactions which seem impossible, or at least, magical!

However, we discovered that pulling off an improvised blacklight show isn’t easy, especially in the (not quite dark enough) corner of our living room with a single UV lamp and only a couple of spare hands! But the girls had a lot of fun trying out various “illusions”, and so… Miss Chu presents a video of our first attempt at blacklight theatre!

 

Whilst doing some online research for our show, we discovered that the home of contemporary blacklight theatre is Prague in the Czech Republic, primarily because it was a Czech – Jiri Srnec – who was the mastermind behind the world’s first blacklight theatre back in 1961.

So here’s what the professional stuff looks like:

Maybe I’ll have to take the kids to watch it someday. At least they know how it all works now!