(Photo credit: Dalo_Pix2)

Royal de Luxe have just staged a Mexican re-imagining of their Little Giantess street theatre spectacular in Guadalajara as part of the Celebrando el Centenario de la Revolución Mexicana. I love the little giantess’s beautiful colourful dress and pigtails. She was accompanied by her farmer uncle, and a new character, a giant hairless Mexican dog, Xolo, who is satisfyingly doggy in the way it pricks up its ears and lopes along. There are  good photos at the Guadalajara Reporter, Super Punch, and Royal de Luxe Central. I also love this street art of Xolo.

Previous posts about Royal de Luxe and their influence.

Puppetrynews and then PuppetVision picked up on this advertisement for the Mayflower moving  company which borrows very directly from Royal de Luxe’s little giantess street theatre spectacle.  It is by no means the first to do so, as we had the Allen’s big doll commercial in Brisbane last year and there have been others that I have been tracking for some years (several pages of posts), which show Royal de Luxe has been highly influential. But the way Audrey settles in her big chair and takes a nap is particularly close to the giantess resting in her deckchair. In my opinion she doesn’t evoke the beauty and mystic that the little giantess does, but she’s not alone in that either!  The makers, The Character Shop, have detailed photos of the making process.

(photo credit: Verieihnix, thank you)

Celebrations are taking place in Berlin this weekend for the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the re-unification of Germany. At the centre of the celebrations is a 4-day performance by Royal de Luxe‘s giant street theatre puppets, featuring their little giantess, and her giant uncle, the deep-sea diver.

Earlier this year in June the diver debuted in Nantes in La géante du Titanic et le scaphandrier, but in Berlin the back story, already one of separation and reunion, has been redrawn as an allegory for the divisions of Germany:

Berlin was once a swamp inhabited by giants.  One day, land and sea monsters tore the city in two and the Big Giant and Little Giantess were separated. The Little Giantess fell into a long sleep. When she awakes, she finds a large old mailbag containing letters between East and West Berlin, and sets out to deliver them.  After each searching the streets of the city, the two giants are reunited and symbolically return tens of thousands of letters once intercepted by former East Germany’s Stasi secret police to people watching their procession through the city.

Photos and videos are starting to appear at Flickr and YouTube, and many others will follow, but here are some links to items that have grabbed my attention so far:

• Official site: Risesen-in-Berlin: The Berlin Re-Union
• @dieriesenkommen on Twitter
• Promo with nice footage from Nantes
• Four videos of the Giantess
• Video of diver surfacing and a close up of the puppeteers
• Reuters video: Giants re-enact German Re-unification
• ABC News video: good summary in video, includes reunion between giants
• Die KlieneRiesen: photo by Gofio of the reunion, Brandenburg Gates
• Royal de Luxe Central photo pool at Flickr
• Search ‘Riesen berlin’ at Flickr, or YouTube

I’ve posted a lot about Royal de Luxe and their influence on the genre of giant puppets over the last few years and you can search here to go to those posts.

(photo credits and thanks: zetavares)

This fabulous giant Pinóquio puppet premiered last weekend at the Imaginarious Festival in Santa Maria da Feira in a street theatre production called The fantastic history of a child called Pinóquio by the theatre company Trigo Limpo ACERT. They come from Tondela, a small town in the centre of Portugal.

The choice of Pinocchio, the classic tale of a wooden boy who wants to become human, is particularly pleasing, because it reflects the puppeteers’ conceit of being able to bring inanimate things to life. And he looks beautifully articulated – I really like the way his leg and foot can turn and rest in his signature stance.

Zetavares has a great Flicker photoset of the 7 metre marionette, and has kindly let me post some of his photos here. He also has interesting sets of the making of the puppet, and the rehearsing the manipulation.

The character was sculpted by Carles of Madrid and Nico Nubiola  of Taller de escultura De la Madrid & Nubiola, both of whom were involved with the production of the opening ceremony for the Barcelona Olympics. They have a cool video of  how they made Pinóquio:

Teatro e Marionetas de Mandrágora were involved with the manipulation of the puppet. I first saw pictures of Pinoquio on their blog Espaço das Marionet@s, which I have been following for a while now.

Trigo Limpo ACERT have previously made some other great street theatre pieces, two of them large versions of traditional wooden push-along children’s toys. Memoriar na rotunda had a man pedalling a bicycle, (making photos here) and Golpe d’Asa, a bird whose wings flap as its wheel base rotates.

(photo:  rafael rybczynski)

My interest was piqued by photo #32 in the Big Picture’s post about Carnival. It’s an impressive dragon puppet float that took to the streets in the Nice Carnival recently. I don’t know who made it, but there are resonances with Royal de Luxe’s giant puppets, for instance the carving of the head, elements of the construction and operation and the way it breathes smoke.

There are some photos at Flickr. In particular, Sparrowlight has a cool sequence of photos of the dragon, including a couple of short videos, here and here ; there is a shot of the puppeteers;  and debs-eye caught the dragon at rest (click to see enlarged):

This great spider is one of the newest creatures by the French company, La Machine (that I posted about a few days ago).  Known as la Princesse, her performance in the streets of Liverpool, England, last September was a highlight of  the 2008 European Capital of Culture celebrations there. She was commissioned by Artichoke, the company who brought Royal de Luxe‘s Sultan’s Elephant to London a few years ago.

A giant spider conjures up dramatic visions of Shelob, huge rearing fangs, giant trapdoors, buildings being webbed in, or the populace being picked off one by one and spun into food parcels, tasty morsels for later. But in one of the BBC videos, her creator, Francois Delaroziere, described the emotion he wanted to provoke as ‘sweet and in love’.

There are squillions of photos of la Princesse online now; here a few links as starters:

Flickr pool
La Machine’s webpage on the event
Main BBC webpage (portal) about the event
Revealed: The secrets of the 50ft robo-spider – ‘There is never a dull moment in Liverpool’ :)

This giant marionette performance was presented at the Beijing Olympics last year by the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson.  It derives directly from Royal de Luxe’s giant puppets, but the story is about a Chinese girl and a butterfly awakening one of the terracotta warriors.  If you dig down in Johnson & Johnson’s site, you can see the trailer, the story board and some cool photos of how the puppets were made.  The tie to the theme of  J&J caring seems somewhat tenuous to me, but never mind!

The companies Poetic Kinetics and AiRealistic who were commissioned to design and develop the puppets and rig, both have interesting galleries of the process. And Bankai has a Flickr photoset.

I’ve been fascinated by the huge puppets instigated by Royal de Luxe for several years now, so while we were in France we went to Nantes to ride their huge sister elephant at Les Machines de I’ile, and to see all the other wonderful semi-fantasy creatures in their emerging menagerie. It was wonderful – if you get a chance, go!

Revitalizing the old shipyards on I’ile de Nantes, Les Machines de I’ile really is a glorious and grand folly in the best sense of the word, flights of fancy made real. We rounded the corner of the building and there was the elephant, absolutely enormous – it’s 12 metres high! – gently swinging its trunk and wafting its ears, and blinking, as it waited to take it’s next walk around the docklands.  From upstairs above the workshops, at the same level as the elephant’s head, we could see the construction and carving close up, and get some idea of the massive mechanics that make it able to move.

Our ride boarded via airplane steps further along the route, and we climbed up to the balcony built into the elephants’ side. The doors into its tummy are decorated with curly turrets and carved animal heads. Inside there is a spiral staircase up to the platform on top, where passengers can look out in all directions, try to work out the mechs in the neck and ears, adopt Titanic-like poses at the front, and waggle the elephant’s tail at the back via a lever that pulls a cable connecting all the segments of the tail! Every now and then the elephant trumpets, and if you are lucky you can operate that from inside it’s belly. I rather suspect they like to keep how it is done a secret, but it’s hands-on and not hi-tech! More often the trunk whooshes steam and water.

The promenade is satisfyingly long – 45 minutes, and it didn’t matter at all to me that perambulating along at 1/4 km per hour you don’t actually cover much distance.

After our ride, we walked out along the steel pole and wood paneling branches that are a prototype for the enormous heron tree that is planned. Hanging along each branch are boxes of plants, the idea being that in time they will provide the greenery of the tree. Extensive research has gone into finding the right kinds of plants, since they have to survive on little water, and in quite an exposed position.

The various models of the whole tree are amazing masses of wire and wood!

I’ve previously posted about the various ride-on creatures that are being built for the emerging Marine Worlds Gallery, and there are lots of photos of them now at Flickr. Since then the Giant Crab, the Bus of the Abyss, and the Storm Boat have been added, and there are some photos of those in my Flickr set.

Outside the workshops is a small carousel roundabout, also with wonderfully unusual creatures to ride – my favourite was a rearing stag beetle. I have lots of photos of these, too, but I think they can wait till another day.

(photo credit: jazamarripae)

It’s interesting when you can see a show like Royal de Luxe having an influence on the culture. I think something like that might have been at work in this dog puppet that was at Barcelona’s Món del llibre, an annual fair to promote book reading/purchasing, oriented towards children. According to jazamarripae (thanks!) there were a couple of dogs and some camels, and this strange thing, all mounted on wheels and operated by levers and pulleys.

I mentioned a giant Korean boy puppet before, but have found a few more pictures of him in Korean now: photos from anomi1: 1, 2, 3,4. I’d still be interested to find out more about him and who made him. From the same occasion there is also this face which has the same puppet mechanism marks at the side of it’s mouth.

This cool girl puppet (photo by driguiluza) in Chile, where Royal de Luxe toured earlier this year, is another example.

_Kreibel_, who started the Royal de Luxe Central group photo pool at Flickr, has some related stencils, and a tutorial on how to do them. He also has some photos of Kijk mij! a street exhibition of Jordi Bover’s photographs of the audience watching Royal de Luxe.