Performance stills: Giles Bailey

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In OHMMG lighting is elevated from its usual supporting role in live performance and considered performing electric bodies in their own right with their own propensities, abilities and modes of operation. A blurring of live machine noise and human utterance occurs as microphones lift and amplify fixtures' internal workings and grunts. "Serious" UV canons 'ohm' with seemingly spiritual energy, but are limited to one mode of address. Infinitely more agile 'moving heads' transition effortlessly between various states, their behaviours challenging the smooth and spectacular movements stage lights are usually associated with.

“Kim Coleman’s performance OHMMG opened the festival. A lone computer-controlled stage lamp rotated slowly, lighthouse-like, a greenish light casting a narrow beam across the space and illuminating one portion of the audience – seated in a circle – at a time. Faces, many familiar, some not, appeared briefly: eyes blinded and shut, heads inclined; or else a confrontation, lids narrowed into the light; preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet, as TS Eliot had it. Here was a masquerade; a reflexive introduction which set up an exchange between viewer and apparatus, revelation and obscuration, framing its audience not as observers but as protagonists – and indeed as it played out, the lamps themselves as agents; lonely dancing robots high on digital affect. And in many ways, though the [festival] was rich and nourishing, it never transcended this moment”  Art Monthly Feb 2019.

​​Video documentation of the performance

Full Art Monthly review of the event

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