Paisley Abbey was lit up last night as part in a once-in-a-lifetime celebration of creativity which has now been unveiled at a number of locations across the UK.
The free outdoor event started yesterday outside the town's 850 year-old landmark and combines a live performance with multimedia installations exploring 13.8 billion years of the history of our universe, from the Big Bang to the present day.
Staged by 59 Productions, the team behind spectacular opening events for the Edinburgh International Festival, About Us last night transformed the landmark Paisley Abbey.
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By day, the spectacular event will also showcase poems and scratch animations by young people from local schools in Renfrewshire and across Scotland.
The show will be presented at the Abbey from 7pm to 9.15pm until Sunday (March 6).
About Us is the first of 10 major Unboxed, an entirely free UK-wide programme, with events and activities stretching from the Outer Hebrides to Southampton, from Omagh to Swansea, and across traditional and online media until October.
Each of the Unboxed projects share new ideas and possibilities for the future and are the result of collaboration across science, technology, engineering, arts and maths.
Arts organisations and designers, scientists and international research projects, tech companies and universities are amongst contributors forming new partnerships to develop and realise each project – hundreds of people have been employed as a result, including freelance creatives in addition to skills development opportunities and bursaries offered by the projects.
Martin Green CBE, chief creative officer of UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK, said: “About Us is the first of UNBOXED’s ten awe-inspiring major projects given life through creative collaboration across all sectors.
“As a result, they have created truly extraordinary audience experiences that will demonstrate the power of creativity and how important it will be to the way we work, live learn and play in the future.
“About Us dramatically touches on themes seen across all the UNBOXED projects, from mankind’s relationship with nature, responsibility for the environment and future possibilities for planet Earth to how people understand and interact with each other as individuals and communities.
“Everyone involved in making UNBOXED happen has been compelled to think about what is most important to all our futures and manifest this in projects designed to be fun and exciting, that will bring people together across the UK this year and provide inspiration for many years to come.”
About Us has been created by the award-winning 59 Productions, one of the creative and technological forces behind the London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony; Stemettes, an award-winning social enterprise working to inspire and support young women and non-binary people into science, technology, engineering and maths careers; and The Poetry Society, one of the UK’s most dynamic arts organisations.
Lysander Ashton, director of 59 Productions and creative director for About Us, said: “About Us has been a unique collaborative process bringing together poets, scientists, musicians, visual artists and school children from across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
“All of these unique voices have contributed to create a dazzlingly rich composite view of the extraordinary universe we all share.
"About Us is an invitation to experience a world where you are made of stars, you’re built from a trillion intricate cells working in harmony, you are related to dinosaurs and you can make a connection to a billion people with the press of a button; it’s a celebration of some of the incredible things that make us, us, and I can’t wait for audiences to come and see it."
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