With poems and lights, UK kicks off year-long creativity celebration

With poems and lights, UK kicks off year-long creativity celebration.

LONDON, (Reuters) - From live choirs to luminous projections, a free, open-air event exploring the history of the universe kicked off in the Scottish town of Paisley on Tuesday, as part of a UK-wide event this year celebrating creativity.

A collaborative effort between scientists, musicians, poets, visual artists and school children, "About Us" is the first project on show for "UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK", which will run events in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and online until October. 

Covering 13.8 billion years of history from the Big Bang to today, "About Us" looks at how humans are connected to each other and our relationship with nature and the cosmos.

"The basic concept...is that all of the iron in all of our bodies, no matter who we are in the world, comes from the same star system and we are literally all made of the same stardust," Martin Green, chief creative officer of "UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK", told Reuters.

"And so the show acts as that connection point to show what we have in common rather than as too often happens, what we have different between us.”

The event, created by 59 Productions, The Poetry Society and social enterprise Stemettes, features animated projections accompanied by poetry, as well as music and live choirs.

It runs in Paisley until March 6 before heading to Londonderry in Northern Ireland, Caernarfon in Wales as well as Luton and Hull in England as part of a five-stop tour running until May.

"UNBOXED", which is funded by the four governments of the UK, will hold 10 multi-site and digital projections during 2022, with input from designers, scientists, arts organisation, tech companies and universities.

"We wanted a project that would go end to end in the UK and visit places that all too often don t get high quality, imaginative work on the scale that we re able to do it through the ‘UNBOXED’ project," Green said.