Turning cities into fiery playgrounds

Helen Marriage is co-director of Artichoke, a creative company that stages big public street events
The company's newest project, a festival of illuminated art, is underway in the UK
Festival, called Lumiere, seeks to help unite divided Irish city of Derry-Londonderry
Marriage spoke to CNN at PopTech, an annual conference in Camden, Maine




(CNN) -- There are few more concrete examples of the longtime rift between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland than the walled city on the RiveFoyle.
Its official name, and the name used by most residents of the UK, is Londonderry. But Irish nationalists and Catholics call it simply Derry.
The city was a flashpoint for the violent conflict between unionists and nationalists that swept Ireland from the 1960s through the 1990s. Its Catholic and Protestant children attend segregated schools. Even today it's not uncommon for road signs pointing motorists to Londonderry to have the "London" blacked out by graffiti.
This weekend, however, Derry-Londonderry plays host to an event its organizers hope can help unite this divided city, at least for a few days. Called Lumiere, it's a four-day festival expected to attract tens of thousands of spectators to see the city's historic cathedrals, walls, bridges and squares illuminated by splashes of light. Projects range from LED and neon sculptures to large-scale projections by leading artists and lighting designers from Ireland and beyond.
"It (the city) has been a contested space for a very long time. And we're going there in the hope that ... maybe people who haven't felt comfortable standing next to each other in the streets will find an opportunity to do that," said Helen Marriage, co-director of Artichoke, a London-based company that stages large-scale public events across the UK.




Helen Marriage, co-director of Artichoke, a UK-based company that plans large-scale artistic events.

"It may be a naive hope, but the hope is that communities who are divided by heritage or tradition or faith will find something new they can all enjoy together."
Marriage knows what she's talking about. In her eight years at Artichoke, which she co-founded with Nicky Webb, she has orchestrated numerous public, artistic spectacles in London and other cities. Each have drawn throngs of people who packed the streets, faces bright with wonder, to witness their city be transformed if only for a moment into something magical.
"I don't exaggerate the power of what we do," Marriage told CNN during her recent appearance at the PopTech conference, an annual gathering of artists, scientists and thought leaders in Camden, Maine. "But the way people are moved by the work, and the way it makes them feel about their town, is something that's hard to describe. You can absolutely feel it in the air."
The Sultan's Elephant
In retrospect, the birth of Artichoke's first project was a minor miracle.
In the early 2000s, Marriage and Webb wanted to bring Royal de Luxe, a French street-theater company, to London to mount a spectacle in the streets with enormous marionettes acting out a fanciful story about a young girl and a time-traveling elephant. Marriage had to persuade skeptical city officials to shut down parts of central London and reroute traffic while convincing them the event wasn't just a piece of frivolous disruption.
"You can imagine sitting in front of 25 gentlemen in various uniforms and suits, and saying, 'Hey guys, it's a kind of fairy story, about an elephant and a little girl. And we'd like to shut the city (down) for four days,'" she said. "A lot of them admitted afterwards that they thought we were mad."
This lobbying effort took Marriage five years.
"I used to go to these meetings and say, 'Please, may I do this?' And then I realized I was asking the wrong question. If you say to somebody, 'Please may I do this thing that's a bit unusual,' you're placing them in a position where they have to authorize your unusual behavior. And of course their instinct is to say no," she said.