An Authentic Magic Lantern Show at the Kinema

South Coast Tales: An Authentic Magic Lantern Show at the Kinema

Experience beautiful hand painted glass slides from a hundred and fifty years ago projected through an authentic magic lantern which is just as old. Accompanied by live music, songs will be sung, stories told, jokes cracked, and incredible special effects created live on screen.

In the 1800s the towns of the South Coast were regularly visited by travelling entertainers. Decades before the movies, they projected ‘beautiful dissolving views’ through magic lanterns powered by limelight.  Audiences were enthralled as, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the dark, they experienced the suspense, pleasure and laughter of pictures painted on glass mysteriously transforming one into the other.

We use a magnificent mahogany and brass biunial magic lantern for our contemporary show.  Through it, we manipulate, animate, and project authentic hand-painted and photographic slides from the period. Accompanied by musicians, performers, artists and surprise guests we will give you the same experience audiences of all ages had back then.

You will be overwhelmed by the intensely pulsating psychedelic colours generated by mechanical chromatropes. You will thrill to melodramatic stories told through word, image and sound. You will experience local history and the local environment in a whole new light.  And you will personally bring back to life the 150-year-old laughter of comic slides such as Man Eating Rats where, well, a man eats rats!

Our travelling team of collaborators has previously performed at the Cellblock Theatre, Powerhouse Museum, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and many other festivals and venues around Australia. Now we have arrived in Narooma, at the century old Kinema, for the River of Art Festival.