Laser light shows
Duncan Fallowell
There is a battle on in London at the moment 'which will interest modern people like us, especially now that the Jubilee has stimulated the public's appetite for majestic show business. The battle is between the laser show at the London Planetarium (Laserium) which should have opened first but didn't, and the one at the Metropole in Victoria which pipped it by a couple of days. Both are the first such shows in Europe and both have come over from America, of course.
It is like being in at the beginning of cave paintings or getting the first bioscope or the Ballet Russe; and before long should have no less radical an effect on general appear- ances. Fashion and the pop world will be the first to respond, then consumer industries with lasers you can paint the clouds (it has already been done• in Cambridge, Mas- sachusetts).
Explaining what this new medium actu- ally is will give one a chance to intone the liturgical language of avant-garde technol- ogy. The advantage of this is that, although the meaning will elude all of us, the magic will get through. LASER: Light Amplifi- cation through Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Electrons are agitated inside a krypton gas tube and oscillate back and forth between mirrors at each end of the `optical cavity'. Since the mirrors are not 100 per cent reflective a number of elec- trons escape. As the activity of the escaping electrons drops, the surplus energy is released in a stream of photons which is the laser beam. This beam is solid, tactile. Instead of dispersing as in conventional light, its rays travel in parallel, giving the beam an unearthly coherence and luminos- ity. High-power laser guns are known to produce bursts of light brighter than the surface of the sun. The appearance of one in Gold finger has led the public to imagine that they are exclusively destructive. Those presently in use in London however pro- duce their remarkable effects from a single watt. The beam is refracted through prisms to create four basic colotfrs (red, yellow, green, blue), then through diffusers to cre- ate design. The results are intense but harm- less.
I knew I had come to the right place when I saw a lot of strange things floating in the foyer of the Metropole. Collectively these are known as the press and what happens to them before and after previews nobody knows. Also floating in the foyer but this time decently contained in glass cases are the holograms, three-dimensional photo- graphic images with the appearance of solid objects. Actually they were invented in England in the late forties by Dr Dennis Gabor but had to wait for the arrival of lasers in 1960 to provide the necessary light source for their development. Now you can buy hologram pendants and paperweights. How long before hologram TV?
Lovelight calls itself the first laser musical but do not expect holograms of Lucille Ball or Ethel Merman doing the kangeroo hop because it traces the evolution of man from the swamp to outer space: promising. But when the heavens did get round to opening, four squiggles poked out, wobbled around for forty-five minutes to the sound of Hal- lelujah rock music, then withdrew. This par- ticular laser machine is said to be more advanced than any other because it can draw representational pictures. Well, it draws exactly like Cocteau used to draw. which is rather like building a Centurion tank for the purpose of shooting down spar- rows. I mean — who wants these scratchy little pictures? And the extensive arrange- ment of mirrors necessary' to produce the two-dimensional drawings greatly weakens the impact of the light. The inventor of this cumbersome drawing apparatus, Jean `Coco' Montagu, failed to show up for ques- tions in the bar afterwards, so one was unable to ask him why it had been let out of the bag in such an underdeveloped state. The future of laser animation must surely lie with holograms rather than with crayon sketches such as this.
Unfortunately, I was tipsy and fifteen minutes late for Laserium at the Planetarium, too late even to catch the pop music press priming themselves with cocaine in the foyer. Inside it was pitch black — that is, the vertiginous luminosity of the display in the roof. blacked out all else.
The only reference point was provided by voluminous organisms of brilliantly col- oured light doing something visceral to 'The Blue Danube' and with an unexpected lunge they swallowed me up" entirely in a disconcerting arrangement of mul- ticoloured spirals and parabolas. The effect was decidedly sexual. Had it not been for psychedelic experience in my Timothy Leary days I could well have been taken aback.
After Lovelight one was beginning to wonder if all this laser business would tarn out to be just a lot oferotte. But Laserium is a sensational show, ravishing mobile abs- tractions beautifully involved with the* music which ranges from Corelli to Pink Floyd, People really can handle abstract entertainment these days. Indeed the whole abstract school of painting can now be seen simply as groundwork for spectacles like this.
The man responsible for it is Ivan Dryer, an American who combines great imagi- nation with perfect poise. He did show up afterwards. While wishing to ask him if this audio-visual inundation did any damage to the eyes I kept crashing into pillars by mis- take and when at last I spotted him he went all green and purple and ultramarine. Then my eyeballs began to crawl down my cheeks like a couple of radishes in search of sym- pathy and a decent home. Just in time to avert an accident we were all ambushed by trays of champagne and mountains of saus- ages. Obviously there is money in lasers. And where there is money, art will surely follow.
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