Lumière London, January 2016
by Mark Freeman
I spent a large part of Saturday night strolling around
central London looking at the various light displays that had been mounted –
for this weekend only – for the Lumière festival. Streets were closed, and thousands
came onto the streets of the capital to look at a whole range of installations,
ranging from the modest to the huge.
Above: Fish floating above Piccadilly
Highlights included lit-up fish floating above
Piccadilly, a circus projected onto the side of the large building in Granary
Square, and a strange object positioned in the sky above Oxford Circus. The
festival lit up the wintery night sky, and is part of a tradition of son et lumière shows that – arguably –
have something in common with historical pageantry.
Above: A lit formless shape floating above Oxford Circus
Son et lumière originated in France in the 1950s, and Raphael Samuel (Theatres of Memory (1994), pp. 179-80) dates its first appearance in Britain to 1958. This was when Buxton hosted its ‘Pageant of Light and Sound’, which Tom blogged about on this site back in March 2015. Although called a pageant, this was very different from the kind of historical pageant that we normally write about here. It depicted ten historical episodes (and one contemporary scene), and was voiced by a theatre group, the Guildford Theatre Company, and directed by Christopher Ede, one of the leading pageant-masters of the post-war generation. (Ede had produced the Guildford pageant of 1957, and brought the performers with him.) Although shown more than 40 times, the son et lumière show failed to attract the hoped-for audiences, and the Buxton ‘pageant’ was a failure.
But Ede persisted with the format, and went on to produce many more son et lumière shows. Son et lumière was used to mark the centenary of the Blackpool Tower in 1994, and Samuel suggests that it could be the origin of the floodlighting of churches, and perhaps a ‘subliminal influence’ on other public floodlighting displays.
Back in October 2014 Tom and I blogged about a son et lumière show in Bury St Edmunds, which marked the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta.
Above: The son et lumière show in Bury St Edmunds, October 2014
Lumière London was mostly lumière and not so much son, although, in one spectacular installation, an elephant could be heard trumpeting from half-way up Regent Street to Piccadilly Circus. The circus show at Granary Square was also accompanied by music, and was enjoyable despite the rain.
Above: An elephant in Regent Street
We are giving a lot of thought to the decline of historical pageants, and what they were replaced by. In a period when it was increasingly difficult to mobilise large proportions of the population of a town or city behind a pageant, the son et lumière show was an ideal alternative. Certainly Christopher Ede thought so. In Lumière London, we saw an example of what came after the historical pageant.