AT THE CIRCUS:World-class French artists La Compagnie Malabar will perform their spectacular show at the 35th Kilkenny Arts Festival The Hélios show is constructed around a story telling of the birth of the sun, writes Rosita Boland
FOS-SUR-MER is about an hour's drive west from Marseilles, and that drive is not a pretty one. Marseilles is a busy port and the surrounding industrialised coastline is studded with oil containers that extend to Fos-sur-Mer, over which a haze of smog drifts between the sea and the blue sky. The residents of Fos-sur-Mer can't do anything about the relentless industry that surrounds them, but they can ensure that their annual summer festival quite literally brightens up their town.
Each year, the 24,000 strong population of the town holds a festival, Festival les Chromatiques, in July, which is themed around colour. This year, it's purple. At first, I think that the choice of colour has something to do with the fact that we are not far from Provence and the lavender-growing region.
"No, no," explains Nina Pire, technical director of La Compagnie Malabar, a French company which provides big Macnas-type parades at festivals at home and abroad. "Nothing to do with lavender. The people's choice." Malabar, with their parade and street show, Hélios II, are opening Chromatiques. The next time they put on this show it will be in Ireland, at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in August.
We're driving through the narrow old streets of Fos-sur-Mer, and there's a lot of purple in evidence. Residents have tied ribbons and banners from doors, windows and balconies. The bunting is purple. Olive trees are blossoming with purple bows. Children from local schools have made a series of purple-themed tents and installations. There are huge monochrome photographs on walls all over the town of local people of all ages which have been customised with purple stickers and markers.
Outside the butcher's shop is an apron, which his customers have signed in purple ink. Old cars destined for the breaker's yard have been sprayed purple and parked at various locations around the town. Preparations are being made for tonight's open-air supper in the town square.
Everything in the food line that isn't already naturally purple - grapes, beetroot, radishes - is being dyed. In the evening, I'll queue up with the townspeople and be served purple pasta, water, yoghurt, and crisps. The overall effect is really quite surreal, like a Francophile version of Chicago on Paddy's Day, where everything, even the river, temporarily changes colour.
Malabar's contribution to the theme of the festival tonight will be to adapt their show a little, by using purple smoke and fireworks. I'm already wondering if someone has told them Kilkenny in August, at the height of the GAA season, is smothered in black and amber.
The Hélios show is constructed around a story telling of the birth of the sun. Like all large-scale shows of this type, the story is secondary, serving as only the roughest of narrative devices for all the physical theatre, circus, and pyrotechnics that drive the action. The key element of Hélios is an enormous gold praying mantis, constructed out of a reconditioned trailer and crane. Inside the shining golden walls of the insect's body are drums kits, a lighting system and the hydraulics that control the "neck" (a crane) and all its many legs.
At any one time, Malabar can be running four shows concurrently in different countries. Everywhere they go, from Dubai to Prague, from Mexico to Kilkenny, the crew and performers first walk the parade route, to check out the logistics. Tonight, for example, due to the narrowness of the streets, they can't parade with Hélios the enormous praying mantis. What the company are checking out now, as they walk tonight's route in Fos-sur-Mer, is where cables, banners and bunting will interfere with stiltwalking. Malabar's stilts are sprung and very high-tech: a cross between a pogo stick and a stilt. These stiltwalkers don't simply walk stiffly at a height, they bounce and run like giant lanky rabbits, and it's exhilarating to watch. They are also looking for balconies and roofs to climb onto, and open spaces where they can do a bit of joshing and juggling without getting electrocuted.
From early evening on, the townspeople and their children start filling up the streets of Fos-sur-Mer. First they line up at the tables outside the town's tourism office, to place their votes for next year's colour theme, by putting either a pink, yellow or white slip into a ballot box.
Virtually everyone is wearing some kind of purple, whether it be a T-shirt, hair-ribbon or belt. Children wear purple dresses, some women sport purple wigs, and even the dogs have kerchiefs around their necks. Tables and chairs are carried out of houses and restaurants and as dusk appears, people tuck into their plates of purple pasta. It's the most interactive festival I've ever attended.
All the reconnaissance earlier in the day has paid off. When the parade starts to move through the town, the stiltwalkers startle the crowd by clambering onto balconies and roofs. How can they manage to be so agile when they are also so tall? At the locations where the purple-sprayed wrecked cars are parked, they literally spring onto the car roofs and jump up and down on them, as tall as the cypress trees that grow nearby. It's like watching a computer game, except you know these are real people - Julien Faucher, Gilles Mouginot, Davide Ragot and four others - wearing these stilts. The enthralled crowd follow the performers through the streets like magnets.
Hélios, the praying mantis, waits at the edge of town. By night, his huge green eyes flash, the legs and pinchers flex out into the crowd and the golden body glitters in the lighting rig. Drummer Barry McVicar crashes his kit, and the stiltwalkers do gymnastics and juggle with each other's bodies. How they remain upright I do not know.
There are some very fine acrobatics from Stéphane Bernier and Bénédicte Engelibert. Bernier works not with ropes but pieces of cloth, which he winds around himself like tourniquets as he somersaults with brutal grace up and down the length of the praying mantis's neck. Engelibert works with a hoop suspended from the insect's mouth, her limbs rarely appearing to touch the hoop at all as she dangles or swoops through the air. They get the loudest applause of the night.
The biggest surprise of Malabar's show at Fos-sur-Mer also surprises the performers. The final (purple) fireworks have been set to go off at some distance from the crowd, among and under the town's old walls. However, when they start exploding, the fireworks aren't the only things flying through the night sky. The explosions have disturbed the town's resident colony of bats, who nest among the old masonry and now come flapping out in their hundreds to fly over the heads of the crowd, who are not quite sure for a moment if this is part of the show. There may not be bats when Malabar perform in Kilkenny, but as Hélios represents the spirit of the sun, we can guarantee that we'll be seeing the sun at least once later this summer in Ireland.
On Saturday August 9th, at the 35th Kilkenny Arts Festival, La Compagnie Malabar will parade Hélios II through Dean Street, Irishtown, Parliament Street, and High street, to Kilkenny Castle, where the show will be performed. The Kilkenny Arts Festival will run for 10 days, from August 8th to 17th. www.kilkennyarts.ie