City and Spectacle: Lyon's Fête des Lumières

Light, color, art, waves of humanity

December darkness is a haven and canvas for light. In December, we flock to light and color like moths to flame. Christmas has surely always had candles, but I suppose the scale of our light-hunger has increased exponentially with electricity, and more recently, Instagram. In Europe, light shows are almost as much of a given as Christmas markets this time of year. Last winter, I went to no fewer than four light shows in England and Paris—five if you count the streets of London glittering (famously) with all their might—each more spectacular than the last. More than eye candy—feasts of visual delicacies.

Lyon’s Fête des Lumières is its annual offering at this banquet. I had never heard of it before this year, but apparently it’s so famous that people travel long distances to come feast their eyes. The first person to tell me about the Fête des Lumières warned me about the crowds in almost the same breath. So did every other friend to whom I mentioned the event. (Lyon certainly wants the crowds and their boon to the tourism industry; public transit is drastically reduced or free for the duration of the festival.¹) Being the light-and-color hound that I am, I was determined to go anyway, even if planning consisted entirely of strategizing which of the four days of the festival might be the least crowded.

Unlike most of the winter light shows I’ve seen in the past, Fête des Lumières is not remotely about Christmas; it’s not even about winter. It’s about light as art, and it’s about Lyon. It’s less a saturated swirl of color, like the garden-based shows where every tree is illuminated, and more a gallery of installations at the scale of a city. All of Vieux Lyon and nearby neighborhoods are closed to vehicular traffic, and the displays, both projections and physical sculptures, are parceled out along the old streets and facades, as well as elsewhere in the city. So going to the festival means not only ogling the spectacles, but also an evening stroll past cafes and bars open for business, admiring the Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourvière glowing golden up on the hill and watching the twin rivers, Rhône and Saône, flow under the lit bridges as they always do. There are teenagers hawking vin chaud for their school clubs from rickety tables, and trinket-sellers at makeshift stands whipping out light-up balloons and blinking baubles, but nothing more commercial than that. It feels a little like you’ve walked into a school fair, except you’re in the third-largest city in France.

The distance between the installations means that it’s impossible to see everything in one night. My friend Marianne and I had only budgeted one evening, bookended by the hour-and-a-half train journey from Grenoble. We traced out a possible route around the city center displays, prioritizing the highlight tour of “grands spectacles” listed on the website, which seemed like an intuitive way to narrow it down. If we were surprised at first by the easy flow in the streets, we didn’t think about how the waves and knots of humanity were waiting for us in the narrow streets around the Place des Jacobins and the Place des Terreaux. But we’ll come to that.

Our first encounter was in fact, from afar, the Basilique and its illuminated hillside message, “Merci Marie,” which (intentionally or not) harks back to the origin of the festival: the dedication of a statue of the Virgin Mary on that hill in 1852, lit by spontaneous candlelight after severe flooding had delayed the event.

After the heavily guarded security checkpoint, we found the first sculptures: a wave of glowing orange sticks that evoked flames above a reflecting pool, and, next to the Ferris wheel and the food trucks, giant iridescent bubbles that cycled through sheens of pink, blue, and green (“Evanescent”).

We glimpsed our first projection through trees and around a corner, and its overexposed faces and wild gesticulations were something of a mystery. When we got closer, we gradually figured out it was a larger-than-life, stylized Sign Language performance, backdropped at various points by confetti, underwater bubbles, and a semi-apocalyptic cityscape. This was a helpful calibration for much of the festival, in fact: a bit experimental, not quite what you’re expecting, but actually pretty cool, and clearly the work of boundary-pushing artists who nevertheless want to appeal the broadness of this spectacle-seeking audience.

Across the river Saône, we watched otherworldly pink fish and entwined merpeople and sleeping humans in pajamas flow across a façade with real candles glimmering in the windowsills while dreamlike music played on our bank. The image that stayed with me was an anglerfish with a smartphone dangling in its face in place of a lure (a brilliant analogy I’m surprised I’ve never seen visualized before). The installation was called Ceux de fleuve, “Those of the river.”

On our way to the next “grand spectacle,” we passed through a square with a shimmering medallion propped up at the center like a shrine, covered in rainbow-colored sequins that rippled in an artificial breeze. The light was cast ephemerally onto the surrounding walls, refracting faint shadows of bare tree branches that danced like an acid trip. I was almost more interested in the walls than the actual sculpture.

If we hadn’t been able to see the laser-like spotlights beaming into the clouds from the start of the night, the knotting of the crowds would have been enough to tell us we were nearing the most spectacular of the spectacles. The Place des Jacobins is a hub of twelve (12) narrow streets, so it’s no surprise the attempt at traffic control was a failure. After being shoved and shuffled along and briefly separated, we finally found a loosening in the crowd and joined the audience of the laser show emanating from the four-sided statue at the center of the square. Five minutes of light beam choreography twisted and funneled around the looming figures, light turned solid by mist both artificial and real. As I filmed it, I thought of the anglerfish and tried to look at the lights and the buildings instead of the phone screen.

Because of the name of the square I assumed the statue had something to do with the perpetrators of the Reign of Terror. The dramatic flashing lights that spun the figures in and out of shadow and the epic, somewhat menacing electronic music contributed to this general vibe. Marianne dubbed it a “Dan Brown effect,” as if there was some kind of sinister hidden meaning in the historical monument. But in fact, the statue depicts four French artists, and “Jacobins” simply refers to the Catholic order known as Dominicans outside of France, who resided in one of the buildings facing the square hundreds of years ago. The Jacobin Club of the French Revolution was so named for a similar reason when they gathered in a disused Jacobin monastery. Etymological red herrings aside, I think the atmosphere was improved by the misconception.

We made our way to one more spectacle, a huge wrap-around projection on the walls of the Musée des Beaux Arts and the Lyon Hotel de Ville in the Place des Terraux, called Cellulo/d. This was basically a fever dream: black and white footage from the early films of the Lumière brothers—they lived most of their lives in Lyon, manufacturing photography equipment and shooting films there—remixed by an AI engine into colorful phantasms. I didn’t really follow what was going on, but I enjoyed letting it all wash over me. A bonus was a glowing, Japanese-kite-like fish that someone was holding on a stick above the crowd, which had a cameo in all of my photos. I was also, for some reason, delighted by the giant green Sortie projected above arrows directing traffic out of the square at the end of the show.

We were running out of time before the last train back to Grenoble, so we had to drop our spectacle route to see the last closest display, one I would have otherwise skipped because it had the unexciting name of “Experimentations étudiantes.” As it turned out, some off-the-beaten-path was just what we were missing. We found a tucked-away square where a drum ensemble in blinking cat ears was performing an exuberant dance for a ring of people, while others admired small-scale installations, including abstract glowing pipes and a dollhouse with colored windows silhouetting its paper-cutout residents. Down the street, a UFO was periodically beaming both playful adults and enthralled kids with its green circle of light.

As I absorbed the neighborhood festival atmosphere of this little square, I wondered if prioritizing the spectacles had been a bit misguided. If the festival is just as much about Lyon as about the displays, why not be really present for the place? It’s easier to do this when you’re not shoving for a place to become a hemmed-in receptacle for the biggest shows. When instead, you can bask in the individuality of passersby, the bobbing sparkling balloons, the glowing cafes, the street art in alleyways and steep flights of stairs, the reflections of art-light on the walls.

I’ve only ever spent one day in central Lyon by daylight, so I already knew there was much, much more weaving and looking left to do in those streets. The ideal approach to the festival would be to go for multiple nights and take in one patch of light and city at a time, spectacles and hidden gems and the streets between. But even one night of the Fête des Lumières helped to fill out my map and add some streaks of color to my gathering impression of Lyon.

1. The other side of the crowds coin is strict security protocols, as France is in high security alert for terrorism. Fortunately there were no incidents at the festival.