Sound and Light: Contemplating the Claw’s Combination of Surrealism, Sci-Fi, and the Sacred

I first saw a Son et Lumière show in France in the summer of 1983 (at which point, incidentally, all I knew of U2 was a few hearings of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” on the radio.)  I don’t remember what music was used, but I do remember being awed as we sat outside a massive church building, gaping at how the best visual technology then available painted the structure in a rainbow of colors synchronized with the sound.  Parts of the architecture that had seemed purely functional were illuminated with new meaning, and those that were already designed to convey beauty became even more beautiful.

Son et Lumière (it translates to “sound and light”) has now become something of a tourist cliché in Europe (sample video here), but the memory came back to me as I watched YouTube clips from Barcelona and began to discover the incredible artistic potential of the Claw. I had seen the videos in which the band claimed some kinship with Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, whose surrealist spires tower above Barcelona yearning for the sky, and I found an interior columns picture for the U2 Sermons blog that illustrated vividly how someone might make that connection.

A space for worship, Bono called it (though, as usual, immediately demurring that one can worship in many different ways); I assumed the reference was to its scale – arriving at a stadium and seeing, then being contained in, this massive, innovative structure. It would, I guessed, be a 2009 equivalent of the way a medieval peasant might tramp across the fields on pilgrimage and be struck speechless as the hugeness, the feat of engineering, and the up-to-the-moment artistic vocabulary of Chartres cathedral loomed before her.

This isn’t false (and I believe I can say that without having seen U2’s stage set in person yet). “What IS that? It looks like a SPACESHIP!” probably expresses the same general reaction that a medieval peasant would have had to Chartres. But any of us who expected no more than that from the Claw clearly far underestimated Willie Williams and Catherine Owens.

If you’ve followed Williams’ recent individual work at all, you might have guessed something like what we saw in Barcelona was coming: he’s been lighting up sacred spaces in the Church of England for a while now.  He hung a mirrorball in the tower at All Hallows’ on the Wall, London as part of his exhibition of light sculptures, “Lumia Domestica,” and did a massive Easter Vigil light installation at Canterbury Cathedral which “saw the Bell Harry Tower, nave, altar and central crossing flooding with purple light in the week running up to Easter, transforming into rays of gold at a moving midnight mass ceremony on Easter Sunday….One of the key aspects of the whole Presence exhibition is that each work of art becomes integrated with worship.”

Along with Son et Lumière and Williams’ work, one also might mention, as possibly influencing this vision, Tadao Ando’s Church of Light in Japan, whose connection with U2 and the NLOTH sleeve U2Log blogged about last winter.

So yes, the Claw is a “building,” a state of the art, jawdrop-inducing engineering feat, a technological advance over all previous such structures… but it is also a sacred space (in, of course, a broad U2 sense of that term) that becomes a medium for light. That light redefines the structure itself at times: here, for example, the functional rig on top takes on the look of a high Gothic finial – finials for comparison — and that same spire later becomes a pillar of fire a la Moses, with plenty of pillars of cloud elsewhere in the show.

The projected light and color serve as well to illuminate the diversity of meanings a sacred space can evoke: blue womblike safety, the dazzling play of unforgettable fire, blinding, Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus-white light, the descent of power from above, multicolored iconography that by articulating the beauty of the structure opens viewers’ hearts beyond the structure – and even something that’s visually near-impossible in a traditional cathedral, the dark absence of the familiar surrounding structure to reinforce the “light my way” of “Ultraviolet.” Not to mention that of course some of the colors already have connotations as well known in the U2 vocabulary as purple and gold are in the classical Christian one, for example the fan-favorite red of “Streets.”

In this innovative sacred space setting for a live music event, U2 turn out to be channeling the Son, the sound, and Williams/Owens mixing a Lumière that lets us in the sound in a new way. Except now, there are none of the intrinsic limitations of trying to project light-art on an aging, unchangeable building. The U2 team has a cathedral designed to its own dimensions and specifications, one that just plain owns whatever environment it’s put in – and they can make it do tricks.

Put this together with the band’s demonstrated skill at creating emotional intimacy, structuring their shows into an almost spiritual process, and coaxing crowds to participate physically and vocally, and you have a 90,000-person Son et Lumière to end all Son et Lumières.  It’s brilliant. –Beth Maynard

(Thank you to the many Flickr photographers whose work I’ve linked in this piece.)

The editors of Interference follow Beth Maynard on the the U2 Sermons blog. Impressed by her commentary on the Claw, we asked her to write this article and are so grateful that she obliged. She is the co-editor of Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog and will deliver a paper at the U2 conference in Durham NC this fall entitled “U2 Live: Where Leitourgia Has No Name.”