David Bowie: You're Not Alone will open in Brighton next summer for a limited season
Photo: Lightroom
Lucy Davies, Director and CEO of Brighton Dome, has today announced that the critically acclaimed and hugely popular 360° experience David Bowie: You’re Not Alone will open for a strictly limited season in the Corn Exchange, from 16th July to 30th August 2027.
The 360° experience showcases some of Bowie’s landmark performances that redefined popular culture, using a mixture of iconic, rarely seen and never-before-exhibited material, selected from thousands of hours of film in the vaults of the David Bowie Archive in New York, from Space Oddity through Diamond Dogs and ”Heroes” to ★. Produced by immersive London venue Lightroom and designed by multi-award-winning studio 59, part of global design and innovation agency Journey, You’re Not Alone is written and directed by 59’s Co-Founder and Studio Director Mark Grimmer, who was Creative Director for the V&A’s David Bowie Is exhibition, and Head of Design Tom Wexler.
Photo: Lightroom
Audiences will have the chance to feel they have travelled through time to experience Bowie in performance - up close and first-hand. Each track in the show has been newly reconfigured to utilise Lightroom's specialised spatial audio system by multiple Olivier and Tony award-winning sound designer Gareth Fry (Harry Potter & The Cursed Child, David Bowie Is).
This is David Bowie, the man himself. Instead of magnifying the myth through the lens of his characters - Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, The Thin White Duke - You’re Not Alone places its focus on the man behind the masks: the provocateur, the polymath, the shapeshifting icon in his enduring, human form.
The film is structured in thematic chapters in a looping presentation, giving a unique insight into Bowie's perspective on the subjects most important to him, including theatricality, spirituality, songwriting and the transformative power of creativity. There are surreal moments, like the transatlantic TV interview with Russell Harty in 1975, in which Bowie artfully takes control of the narrative, and the interviewer is reduced to asking him questions about the colour of his hair. Elsewhere, the reconstructed set of the inimitable Diamond Dogs tour materialises before our very eyes, igniting a Bowie performance unlike any other captured on film.
Photo: Lightroom
Bringing together a wealth of visual material from a wide range of sources, the show combines rare performance footage, photography, drawings, lyrics, personal notes and audio recordings. David Bowie: You're Not Alone will celebrate Bowie's boundless curiosity as a force that connected people across continents and generations, as well as his enduring cultural impact today.
David Bowie: You're Not Alone is being made in close collaboration with and authorised by the David Bowie Estate.
Mark Grimmer, who also wrote and directed Lightroom’s David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller and further away) said:
It says something about our relationship with artistic heroes that we're drawn to mystery, otherness, the alien... In Bowie's case, this is our construct, not his. Throughout his career, Bowie repeatedly resisted being figured as anything but human. Rather than undermining his mystique, we designed a show to celebrate Bowie as a champion of human creativity - focusing on the message he expressed time and again: that art, in all its forms, is our best hope for understanding what it means to be alive.
Lucy Davies, Director and CEO of Brighton Dome said:
This marks a new collaboration with the mighty Lightroom and a homecoming for Bowie to Brighton Dome, after his 1973 ban! Over the summer of 2027 our doors will stay open for this landmark experience in our beautiful Corn Exchange, bringing something very special to the city.
Richard Slaney, Lightroom Chief Executive, said:
The response to David Bowie: You’re Not Alone in London has been phenomenal, and we’re delighted to be able to see it open in Brighton in 2027, alongside more cities across Europe, to mark what would have been his 80th Birthday. The show offers the chance to feel the excitement of those groundbreaking performances, and get inside the mind of one of the greats.
David Bowie: You're Not Alone will run at Brighton Dome Corn Exchange from 16th July to 30th August 2027. Tickets are priced from £29.50 per person and will go on sale at midday on Friday 2nd October. For more information, visit brightondome.org
