Durham’s bid to be City of Culture took a big step forward this weekend with the Lumiere Festival which seemed to be a fantastic success. I went on Sunday night when the city centre was full and had a really exciting buzz about it. People were enjoying the mix of stunning, giant spectacles and interactive, fun installations. The son et lumiere show at the Cathedral was particularly breathtaking, with projections telling the story of the building, even showing it being ‘built’.
The feedback on the Lumiere website and Twitter makes a few comments about the minor details of the organisation of the event but is mostly really enthusiastic, some people even describing it as ‘life-changing’ - you can’t get much a much more satisfying review of art than that! I know of various people who travelled to Durham specially for the festival and I don’t think they would have been disappointed - the city looked magically beautiful and it was fun to just wander around exploring the various vistas and installations and seeing people react to them.
Lumiere is a progression on 2008’s Enlightenment Festival and the chat on Flickr and other sites is that people are hoping this will become an annual event. There’s also a call for some of the lighting, such as the colours higlighting the viaduct, to become permanent fixtures, in place of the comparatively stark street lighting.
ONE NorthEast has a mission to support ‘World-class Festivals’ and this was certainly one of them.