Search Results for: royal de luxe

A few titbits from Royal de Luxe’s Sea Odyssey Giant Spectacular

Posted by hil

The Royal de Luxe‘s Sea Odyssey Giant Spectacular that took place at the weekend in Liverpool to commemorate the Titanic centenary seems to have been a roaring success, with a huge turnout and press coverage. There are a great many photos and videos online now (including at Flickr), so I’ll only mention a few that interested me in particular.

Journalists from the Liverpool Echo were the first ever to be allowed to visit the company’s headquarters in Nantes and they have an article and brief behind the scenes video clip. This gives us a glimpse of the workshop, and interviews with the director who coordinates the teams of people who move the giants, and the Little Giantess’s movement conductor.  I was interested to see La Machine viewed as a rival company! There seemed so much cross-over between the two that I’ve always assumed they were associated or sister companies!

I also hadn’t seen the Little Giantess dancing with joy before! At Flickr kingo62 has a great photo from the dance.

And I was taken with Xolo being washed and having his teeth brushed. His ears have great movement, they’re really expressive.

Previously:

Royal de Luxe’s Sea Odyssey

Posted by hil

 

Four years ago La Machine debuted their giant spider, La Princesse in Liverpool. This year, as one of the cities directly connected with the Titanic which sank on 15 April 1912, it’s marking the centenary with numerous events, the highlight of which will be the Sea Odyssey Giant Spectacle by the associated company, Royal de Luxe, on 20 – 22 April. It’ll feature the Little Giantess and her uncle, the deep sea diver, in a story adapted for the occasion. A number of cool promo ads in which the Little Giantess is wandering the city and peeping into different famous places have been released.

 

 

Search my blog for La Machine and Royal de Luxe if you are interested in more links – I’ve posted a lot about them and their influence over the years!

Royal de Luxe’s giants celebrate reunion in Berlin

Posted by hil

deepseadiver

(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:

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.

Influence of Royal de Luxe spreads

Posted by hil

Dogpuppet

(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.

Xolo will be in Liverpool too

Posted by hil

Xolo, Royal de Luxe

 

Here’s a great photo of Xolo, Royal de Luxe‘s giant dog!  It’s just been announced that Xolo will be appearing the Sea Odyssey Giant Spectacle in Liverpool in a couple of weeks time, along with the Little Giantess and her uncle, the deep sea diver.

Previously:

Giant wire marionette in Vancouver

Posted by hil

vancouver

(photo credit: stephenccwu)

This huge wire marionette appeared at the opening of the new Vancouver Convention Centre last weekend; I gather it was associated with Cirque du Soleil. It was a performance by the Underground Circus, and the marionette was made by Peter Boulanger (who was kind enough to let me know in a comment below). It’s made of aluminium (I guess it’s really thick round wire?) , and at about 40 feet, billed as the tallest marionette in Northern America. The puppet moves to music and is operated by 5 puppeteers working pulleys. In this photo you can see it standing fully, supporting two acrobats: the one in the ball and one on the length of material. This is a great photo of it, too.

(influence of Royal de Luxe? Peter says not directly, though he knew of their work)

La Princesse

Posted by hil

475px-la_princesse1

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’ :)

The terracotta warrior and the girl

Posted by hil

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.