Arts editor HELEN MUSA previews “Van Gogh Alive”, an immersive show of more than 3000 images set to a classical music score.

AS Canberra prepares to illuminate itself for the Enlighten Festival, one of the most conspicuous constructions underway is a gigantic marquee going up in the middle of the parliamentary triangle.

It’s for “Van Gogh Alive”, which is being staged in partnership with the National Capital Authority.

It’s an immersive show involving huge projections of painter Vincent van Gogh’s most famous images – more than 3000 of them – set to a classical music score.

Imagine being surrounded by the artist’s absinthe-fuelled dreams of yellow sunflowers, for instance.

I caught up with Gary Moynihan, the creative director for Grande Experiences, based in Melbourne and the creator and producer of “Van Gogh Alive”, whose grand experiences have been displayed in more than 160 cities across six continents and now in Canberra.

Grande Experiences also owns and operates Museo Leonardo da Vinci, a permanent museum in central Rome, and has satellite offices in the UK, Italy and the US, so it covers far more than van Gogh.

“The whole concept of presenting art as an immersive experience was a bit of an evolution,” Moynihan says. 

“Originally, we staged artefact-based exhibitions and our museum in Rome still exhibits artefacts, but we found as we observed children engaging with such exhibitions that they were getting bored and distracted, so we came up with the idea of a project involving music and art – something more engaging than just images.”

But aren’t images the essence of an art gallery?

Sure, Moynihan sort of agrees, and they’ve taken a bit of flak from the traditional art museums every now and then on that count.

“But we are okay with that,” he says. “We are not answerable to a board or funding, what we do is for the audience and we are not influenced by any other agenda – we are just interested in what the visitors say and do.”

Moynihan’s lilt betrays his origins in Cork, Ireland, but he’s now well and truly based in Melbourne, from which he says they produce everything – and send it out globally.

The van Gogh show ran last year in Sydney’s Royal Hall of Industries and did well in a year beset with covid. They’ve been in Adelaide, they hope to go to Brisbane and, if WA Premier Mark McGowan permits, they’ll even send their large convoy of trucks across the Nullarbor. 

“It’s the SENSORY4™ multi-channel motion graphics that really enable us to blend cutting-edge technology with classical, fine-art content. It’s a blend of two worlds, with everything in sync,” he says.

But the true joy of “Van Gogh Alive,” he says, is the visitor experience when the technology becomes invisible so that they focus on the content alone.

As for the music, which falls under his aegis, the audio tracks represent van Gogh’s up-and-down life journey, the joys and the depression.

“We made a decision to go down the classical music path, playing emotive music synced to the artwork,” he says, “with darker music to suit the artist’s life in the Netherlands and brighter music when he moved to Arles in the south of France.

The show begins on an upbeat note though, with Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” to set off the tempo, some Handel and Schubert, moving chronologically to the section where van Gogh’s life is about to end through a change to the more dramatic music of French composer, Benjamin Godard.

“We get a lot of good feedback… you walk into an immersive gallery and the images on the big screens are constantly changing. There’s narrative and there’s music and it takes about 40 minutes all in all,” Moynihan concludes.

“Van Gogh Alive”, Parkes Place Lawns, Parliamentary Triangle, seven days a week from March 5. Book at vangoghalive.com.au