Spellbinding Live Cinema performance since 2010.

For the last ten years the Cabinet has created and toured live cinema events, living graphic novel performances and participatory live cinema projects. We have toured to venues and festivals including Wilderness, Shambala, the British Library, V & A and ROH.

Our live scores and living graphic novels are created in collaboration with emerging artists, local community groups, youth groups, museums, art galleries and local festivals through workshops and rehearsals.

In 2020, our Ten-Year anniversary and the year of Brexit, we celebrate Europe’s 100 year cinematic heritage with our #100years tour, using our instruments, voices and hand-held FX to create atmospheric live scores to films – both renowned and unknown – from across Europe.

“The Cabinet of Living Cinema magically bring stories to life with hypnotic animation and beautiful, innovative and atmospheric scores.”
(Liz Moreton, Senior Producer, BAC)

This year, the Cabinet is embarking on a journey through the last 100 years of European cinema in celebration of our shared heritage as a continent. Between now and December 2020, we’ve hand-picked films – renowned and lesser-known – which we feel represent this incredible journey: tracing the avant-garde movements that formed cinema’s language as we know it today.

We crown the tour with our sell-out performance of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920), then Metropolis (1927), Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Vertov’s dazzling Soviet documentary, then Chien Andalou (1929), before leaping between decades and countries to visit Jan Svankmajer in Prague, before landing in France in 2003 for Sylvain Chomet’s deliciously strange Triplets of Belleville (Belleville Rendevous).

Each programme on offer features their innovative and collaborative approach to live cinema. In Man with a Movie Camera & Metropolis, audience members are invited to join in a sound-FX orchestra pit. In Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, a shop dummy is rigged with sound-FX sensors and in Triplets of Belleville the audience power the cinema using bicycles. For all performances, the Cabinet are offering a unique vocal foley workshop in which a pop-up choir learn to create sound FX from scenes from the film and are then invited to perform them live that evening!

Between now and the end of December, we will also be running a select number of workshops for both children and adults in which together we create a score from scratch to short animated films from the studios of Europe including a special animation of the classic children’s story Where the Wild Things Are, produced in Prague with the author Maurice Sendak.