Enchanted Creatures & Faust (1926) Tour

Enchanted Creatures and How to Become One brings animated tales from around the world to life — dancing frogs, a blue-grassing grasshopper, and a hedgehog lost in the fog — with a live score performed on hand-crafted instruments made by young people from the Wilderwoods education initiative, alongside contributions from four continents.

Using hands, voices and these unique sounds, audience members become enchanted creatures, discovering their own voice before joining together to animate the screen, adding rhythm, music and effects to every story.

From Lotte Reiniger’s shadow-puppet magic to the wild rumpus of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, cinema becomes something you can hear, feel and play.

Guided by musicians Caelia (violin), Celeste (trumpet) and Kieron (guitar, keyboard), the enchanted creatures bring every cue and effect to life as the films unfold.

For ages 5+. Please keep phones tucked away — this is a screen-free wild rumpus.

Murnau’s Faust (1926) is reimagined in a new immersive live cinema performance marking 250 years since Goethe’s first draft of Faust and the centenary of its landmark expressionist adaptation performed by The Enchanted Cinema:

Celeste Cantor-Stephens — trumpet, foley FX

Caelia Lunniss — violin, foley FX

Kieron Chissik — guitar, organ, electric viola, and choral FX

Murnau’s Faust is a landmark of German Expressionist cinema, using bold imagery and dramatic light and shadow to tell its story of a pact with the devil and a world in moral collapse. Here, the film is carried by the live score: trumpet cutting through the action with lines stretched through delay and space, violin tracing folk-inspired melodies through its emotional shifts, and electric viola & vocal FX shaped in real time into layered textures that expand the film’s atmosphere in addition to a host of ingenious foley sound FX.

 Following acclaimed performances at LSO St Luke’s, Horniman Museum and Gardens, and Abney Cemetery, this is a rare chance to experience a landmark of early cinema brought vividly to life. At select venues, The Enchanted Cinema are joined by young people on stage to help with foley FX. Supported by the BFI, awarding National Lottery funding through Audience Projects Fund. A Cabinet of Living Cinema CIC production. 

Please note, not all events are live yet. Please follow us @theenchantedcinema for weekly updates.