It's time to light up this city

GO into York city centre tomorrow night and you could find yourself dancing in the streets as part of a living light sculpture.

Blobs, swirls and rectangles of light beamed on to the pavement of the small square next to Caf Nero on Davygate will have been programmed to respond to the movement of people nearby.

The idea is to draw passers-by into the light to get them dancing and moving - almost without them realising it.

"What we will be doing is projecting an abstract moving light sculpture into that space, using the floor as a kind of canvas," says Tom Wexler, a computer whiz with York-based KMA Creative Technology which has developed the revolutionary new project.

"The movement of the light is controlled by the movement of people in that space. As people see something in the square and go closer to look, they will affect it. The light will come out and meet you and follow you around. You'll have people walking past, maybe going for a meal, and as they start to interact with the light they will basically be dancing in the street."

Dancing In The Streets, as the project has been dubbed, will be officially launched at 8.30pm tomorrow by TV boffin Adam Hart-Davis, who is in York to launch the city's Festival Of Science. Dancers from Bretton Hall College in Wakefield will be giving a performance and inviting the audience to join in.

The light sculpture will then be switched on every evening from dusk until midnight, until June.

This brilliantly innovative idea is part of a much larger £1.8m programme. This aims, over the next year, to breathe new light and life into York city centre in the evenings and also to make better use of the city's historic walls.

Much of the cash - the result of bids put in by the city council's economic development unit to Yorkshire Forward and the Regional Development Agency - will be used to transform York city centre at night: to reclaim it from drunks and yobs and make it the kind of place families and ordinary people want to come to again.

As well as Dancing In The Streets, other projects planned include:

Lighting Bootham and Micklegate bars, and other key historic buildings and streets in the city centre such as the Merchant Adventurer's Hall, Fairfax House, Shambles and bridges over the River Ouse

An interactive 'weather patterns' light display to play across the front of York Art Gallery

A trail of reflecting lights that winds through York city centre and links up to stories in a new book, Breadcrumbs, to be published by York publishing house ENDpapers.

"The aim is to make York a safer, more interesting and inviting place in the evening," says Rory McCarthy, a tourism development officer from City of York Council who has been working on putting the package together.

"We want to showcase York's treasured buildings and spaces after dark. We also hope to make the city centre feel safer in the evening. Through lighting we want to discourage those people who want to vomit, pee, fight or take drugs."

The rest of the cash will be used on a parallel project to make better use of the city's historic bar walls. A major survey of the walls was undertaken last year: and ideas being considered include opening stretches of the wall at night, putting up more railings, and having new waymarked routes and better information signs.

"The walls are an under-used resource in York," says Rory. "There are not enough people enjoying them."

The various parts of the programme to transform the centre of York have all been given different labels. York:Light is the tag being used for lighting up the city centre. The interactive displays that will be coming to York over the next weeks and months, meanwhile - such as the Breadcrumbs book project and Dancing In The Streets - are all part of the Renaissance Project. The city walls project is a third strand.

But all the different elements are pieces in the same jigsaw, says Anne McNeill, director of Impressions Gallery and co-chair of the Renaissance Committee.

"They are all quite strong themselves, but once you put them together you have a really imaginative initiative," she says. "It is about celebrating York in terms of contemporary art and culture, to show that it is not all just history and heritage."

Here is a guide to what will be happening over the coming weeks and months.

:: YORK:LIGHT

Historic buildings and streets will be lit up to showcase the city after dark. Both Bootham bar and Micklegate bar will be lighted. Elsewhere, three main areas of the city will get the light treatment - the historic city centre, Exhibition Square and the River Ouse.

Exhibition Square. "Architectural lighting" will be used to show off the front of York Art Gallery. This will not be floodlighting, but a more subtle lighting scheme which will pick out details on the building's front and create patterns of light and shade that reveal its structure. The de Grey Rooms and ancient King's Manor will also be lit in the same way.

The city centre. The lighting at Clifford's Tower will be modernised and improved and Fairfax House, the Mason's House and St Mary's Castlegate will also be lit. Most interestingly, so will All Saints, Pavement. The steeple was originally designed essentially as a gigantic lantern to guide ancient travellers to York through the Forest of Galtres, says Rory. The lighting will attempt to recreate that. "It is not going to be a lighthouse," Rory says. "It will be sensitive and subtle." Street-lighting on Fossgate, Shambles and Petergate will also be improved - with more architectural lighting for some of the finer buildings - to create a 'linear route' through the city at night leading to Exhibition Square.

The riverside. Lendal bridge, Ouse Bridge and the riverside facade of the Guildhall will all be lit.

All lighting projects should be finished by March next year - but if all goes well it could be only the beginning of a ten-year project to better light the city.

:: THE RENAISSANCE PROJECT

DANCING In The Streets is the third interactive light display to have featured as part of the on-going renaissance project. The first was Pedestrian, artist Paul Kaiser's video artwork showing small figures seen from a bird's perspective which was projected on to Stonegate for a month last October.

Next was the Ghost Ships, moving images of ships and viking gods which were projected on to the riverside front of the Guildhall during the Jorvik Viking Festival. "There were tourists, and whole families, just stopping and saying 'Wow! That's magical'," says Anne McNeill.

Dancing In The Streets kicks off tomorrow, and later in the year two more interactive light displays will come to the city. They are;

Breadcrumbs. York publisher ENDpapers will be publishing a collection of children's stories in the next couple of months, to tie in with a special circular trail around the centre of York which will be marked out with colour-coded reflectors. The book will be sold with a torch - so that having read the book, you can follow the adventures of the various characters as you follow the trail around the darkened streets, your torch picking out the reflectors to guide you.

There will be four sets of stories in all, says Breadcrumbs editor Rachel Hazelwood. Slime And Grime, in which a little girl shrunk to the size of a doll takes to tunnels and passages beneath York; Little Feet, in which you find yourself walking with statues and talking animals; Back In Time, in which you join children Fran and Josh in a journey back into York's history; and Breath Of Air, in which you join ghosts and fairies over the rooftops of York.

Weather Patterns. Light as art again, this time in the form of light-emitting panels that will be put up on the front of York Art Gallery, hopefully at around the time of Royal Ascot.

The panels will carry light-patterns based on traditional patterns and decorative surfaces found in York's historic buildings, such as the tiles in the floor of the Minster's chapter house. Instead of being fixed, however, they will respond to the weather, creating an ever-changing "visual reflection of their environment".

:: THE CITY WALLS

Malton firm PLB was commissioned last year to conduct a survey into what could be done to make better use of the city walls. Proposals now being considered include:

Looking at whether the walls can be opened at night

Installing new information panels at street level to give much better information about their history and what walkers can expect to see on the next section of wall

New waymarkers on the walls themselves.

Certain parts of the walls are very popular, says Terry Atkinson of the city council's economic development unit, while other stretches are less so. The general idea is to open up less popular sections of the wall so that more visitors reach other, less frequented parts of the city.

The new information panels and waymarkers should be in place by March next year.

Updated: 09:34 Thursday, March 10, 2005