"This is a machine for walking like an Egyptian. This one crunches apples like Catherine Deneuve. And that's a spit for roasting Joan of Arc."

*sidebar1*In its 100-year existence Paris' majestic Grand Palais museum has never hosted anything like it — a battery of barmy Heath Robinson contraptions that clang, creak, explode and generally make people laugh.

Most museum goers spend an hour or two at an exhibition. At the 'Grand Repertoire' they stay entire afternoons, entranced by a world where pigs really do fly.

"Ladies and gentlemen," announces Mitch, an actor and contraption designer from Marseille, "the Hale Bopp comet."

"This comet is mounted on a 1950s British BSA motorbike. It has an 18-horse-power engine. I counted the horses this morning."

He straddles the spluttering engine, revs hard and the comet shoots 12 metres up into the air. The audience gasps.

Snow machine, time machine

"I've been five years old again for the past two hours," smiles 41-year-old spectator Marie, brushing flecks of soapy snow out of her hair.

"Ah yes, the snow machine," recalls Jacky, another actor-cum-mechanical wizard, struggling out of a battery-powered skirt that whirls like a dervish while he stands still.

The Grand Palais houses the 'street theatre machines'. [Photo: Didier Plowy]

"The scene featured Napoleon in a sulk retreating from Moscow in flames in the middle of a snow blizzard. It was a job to pull off."

Royal de Luxe, creator of 'The True History of France', is one of 15 French street theatre troupes whose wacky inventions are on show in this most august of national monuments.

Although many deserve a category all of their own, the machines on display here loosely serve four different purposes.

First there are the 'living' machines, giants and huge animals around which whole shows revolve. Royal de Luxe's 12-metre (40-foot) giraffe, with its beautifully sculpted face and graceful movements, appears more alive than the 25 Lilliputian humans operating its 25-tonne frame.

Then there are 'hidden' machines for producing effects — rain, wind, ghosts, quakes.

*quote2*One of Jacky's favourites is a lump of rusty piping that turns a noxious mix of explosives and diesel into 50-metre smoke rings.

"You hide it in a town and send up a huge smoke ring. The public chases after it. By the time they've got there, you've moved the machine and sent up another smoke ring somewhere else," says Jacky.

Into the third group fall 'theatrical' machines. These also produce special effects, using domestic objects like electric fans and egg whisks, but here the — very visible — process of production is as important as the end result.

Take the Rhinoceros Sound Machine, an assembly of traffic cones, train horns and other everyday objects. Playing them is an art, as fun to watch as it is to hear.

Useless, absurd, fascinating

Perhaps the most enchanting group is of machines that are absurd, surreal, poetic and totally useless.

Many are contraptions for complicating life, like the Machine for Spreading Nutella on Bread, the Bicycle That Leaves Cow Hoof Prints Behind It and the gloriously kitsch Masturbatorer.

By turns dramatic, whimsical or plain daft, they seek — as did the Surrealists — to engage the public's emotions and encourage them to view ordinary objects in a new light.

For all these machines are made of familiar junk — old lawnmowers, roller skates, bike chains and bits of dentist's chairs — and languished in warehouses for six years until the "Grand Repertoire" brought them back to life.

The 11 one-tonne pages of the Book of France, which each serve as a full-sized stage backdrop for a scene in 'The True History of France', had rusted together.

"It took us two months to prise open the page on Joan of Arc," remembers actor-musician Philippe.

It shows an idyllic pastoral landscape. Turn a wheel and it splits asunder to reveal a Hieronymus Bosch Hell of naked, spit-roasted sinners.

The exhibition does have a serious side. It shows that by supporting small-scale, unorthodox productions — read street, not classical theatre — the state can foster creative talent which would otherwise struggle to survive.

Political sub-text

Many performers in the 'Grand Repertoire' fear a 2003 law that slashes subsidies for freelance artists is killing their profession.

Shakespeare didn't write 'Julius Caesar' in a day, they argue. If he'd only been paid for the couple of hours the play takes to perform, with no support during the months of writing, rehearsing and stage building, this masterpiece would never have seen the light of day.

*quote1*Whatever the view of the men in grey suits, the public at the Grand Palais loves this display of imagination and the actors' theatrical genius.

One of the biggest crowd pullers is the 'Pianopult', created for a Roman torture scene.

Philippe barks out orders while sweating foot soldiers heave a genuine iron-frame piano onto the war machine.

When Jacky activates the 'manual trigger' — an axe — the hapless instrument soars in a graceful arc and crashes in a heap of splinters.

"Yes, it's violent. It's intentional," explains the dark-eyed Patrick, 54. "But it's also a way of saying the beauty of the entire world can be distilled in a single note."

August 2006

Copyright AFP

Subject: Living in France, street theatre, Grand Palais, Quartier d'Ete, festivals in Paris