Giant puppets of Paris’s Royal de Luxe come to life in Perth

AS Royal de Luxe’s Giants prepare to take over Perth, Review goes behind the scenes at France’s most secretive arts company.

THE towering metal gates give it away. Wedged between a boat yard, ramshackle warehouses and the mud-raking Loire River in a scruffy industrial zone on the fringes of ­Nantes in western France, the headquarters of Royal de Luxe — the most revered street theatre troupe of modern times — is otherwise unassuming. But to step beyond its foreboding frontiers is to step into what one local warns is a “surrealistic black hole — you never come out the same way you go in”.

“Welcome,” my guide and translator offers, as we drive through the gates in the company’s beat-up Renault utility. The forecourt of the immense warehouse complex is a psychedelic scrapyard, strewn with the debris of some illusionary realm — a giant wooden rocket ship peering out from beneath tarpaulin and two cars welded in a stack, amid other less discernible artefacts. “Welcome to the secret world of Royal de Luxe.”

While the world of this internationally renowned company may indeed be clandestine — journalists are sparingly granted access to the workshops and no cameras or smart phones are permitted — the company’s productions are anything but inconspicuous, both in reputation and gamut. And that is thanks to a ragtag ­ensemble of gargantuan walking marionettes, collectively known as “the Giants”.

The Giants literally are that which their name implies, thoroughly enormous. Pieced together from wood (malleable poplar), metal and whatever else the enterprising team of coiners and DIY inventors suture into their construction, the tallest, known as the Deep Sea Diver, measures in at a colossal 10m. ­Operated by a team of experienced pupeteers — who manipulate and swing from rope pulleys — and ­machinery, the Giants in action is a scene to ­behold.

Dreamed up in 1993 with a show called The Giant Who Fell from Heaven, Royal de Luxe’s various Giants spectaculars (or sagas, as it calls them) have become a mainstay, and generally the highlight, of arts festivals and city commemorations the world over, and have marked such landmark events as the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Liverpool’s centenary commemorations of the sinking of the Titanic. Next month at the Perth International Arts Festival, the Giants will finally make their Australian debut.

“The Giants is like the Olympics of the arts,” festival artistic director Jonathan Holloway says. “They have the capacity to be memorable and leave a city changed.”

Programmed as part of Holloway’s final year as artistic director in Perth after four years at the helm — the Briton was last week appointed new AD at Melbourne Festival — at a figure approaching $6 million it is the single most expensive production ever programmed in the festival’s 62-year history. In another unprecedented move, Holloway resolved to commission the show outside his normal annual programming budget of $22.4m, going public with an extraordinary appeal for the heady sum needed to bring the show to Perth, climaxing in a clamant front-page plea for donors in the state’s The West Australian newspaper.

“This was personal for Jonathan,” one festival insider tells Review. “He worked passionately on this for two years. It is now his last year in the job and he truly felt he needed this; to ­secure the biggest show going.

“It could have all gone spectacularly arse-up and almost did but, luckily for everyone ­concerned, and especially Jonathan, it didn’t.”

With Royal de Luxe forced to extend the booking deadline after a dismal start, James Packer eventually fronted up with $1m from his Crown Resorts Foundation, while the state government contributed $2m.

The remainder was covered by a mix of corporate and institutional donors. However, just days out from opening at the time of publishing, the production remains “a few hundred thousand dollars short” of budget, Holloway says.

“There were so many moments when we didn’t believe we would achieve it,” Holloway offers, seemingly unfazed that he may be setting an onerous precedent for his successor Wendy Martin, both in relation to budget and audience expectations. “When I personally lost faith, my colleagues and the public pushed us all on. We still have a significant target to hit.

“I’m not a fan of the constant desire to always exceed what has gone before,” Holloway qualifies. “Neither life nor festivals should be about purely getting bigger … That said, if I have made decisions that have impacted on the range of the program then I am comfortable with that. This is a once-in-a-century commemoration of one of our most important historical events, so shifting the model to do that is a ­perfect festival thing to do.”

ON April 25, 1915, the first Anzac soldiers landed on the shores of a distant and alien peninsular whose name, 100 years on, still consumes the national consciousness: Gallipoli. Two giants, known as the Little Girl Giant and the Deep Sea Diver, will stage a three-day performance across various locations in the city centre, drawing on the story of West Australian Fay Howe, known to Anzacs as the “little girl on Breaksea Island”. Howe worked with her father in the Breaksea Island lighthouse, relaying personal messages to the 30,000 soldiers anchored off the coast of Albany awaiting departure in 1914. The troops would finally sail on November 1 that year, destined for their gruesome fate. For many, the messages from the 15-year-old Howe were the last they’d ever see of their homeland.

The two Giants will colonise, and at times dwarf, the city streets of Perth over the three consecutive days (February 13-15), metamorphosing the cityscape of skyscrapers and open esplanades into an immense alfresco stage — reimagining a sphere otherwise familiar to so many. Meandering through a unique course each day, searching out one another and interacting as part of an evolving narrative which incorporates improvisation, the drama will take place in both a morning and afternoon session each on the Friday and Saturday, culminating in one grand finale on the Sunday.

The action will largely centre around the city-east district surrounding Langley Park on the Swan River, with rolling traffic closures and exclusion zones around the city. Each day promises a 24-hour spectacle, with the Giants “resting” and even “sleeping” in public spaces between performances.

Their creators have rendered the goliath marionettes so intimately lifelike they even “breathe” while at sleep. The public will be encouraged to walk in the shadows of, and interact with, these immense beings and many volunteers have been written into the narrative, including the presentation of a giant book created by WA schoolchildren to the Little Girl Giant. Festival organisers are expecting at least a million spectators over the course of the weekend, comfortably making this the biggest production to come to WA, in more ways that one.

“My father is obsessed with uncovering these stories, stories that transcend,” Margot Courcoult says of her enigmatic father Jean-Luc Courcoult, founder and artistic director of Royal de Luxe. Courcoult’s interest in Western Australia was piqued when he staged his production Revolt of the Mannequins as part of the 2009 Perth Festival.

Returning a number of times over the coming years, Courcoult would eventually stumble upon the story of Fay Howe through Dianne Wolfer’s 2010 book Lighthouse Girl.

“He seeks out stories that are simple but ­profound,” Margot Courcoult says. “Stories that everyone can understand, no matter how young or old or educated. Stories that hit the heart. He feels a responsibility. No one will be left unaffected by the show. Yes, we are a French company but the story will be yours, the Giants will ­belong to Australia.”

Jean-Luc Courcoult has been called the Willy Wonka of street theatre. Indeed, the theatremaker has been called everything from debilitatingly timid to dangerously capricious and everything in between. At a performance of the Giants in Liverpool last year he was so overcome with jubilation he jumped into the churning Mersey River, narrowly avoiding arrest.

The mystery surrounding his work carries over to his life. He rarely grants interviews and ­Review’s invitation to meet the director was withdrawn a matter of days before the visit to Nantes.

Courcoult has spent more than 35 years building up the most grandiloquent outdoor theatre troupe in the world.

Born of the 1968 societal and artistic discord in France, Royal de Luxe was formed by ­Courcoult in 1979 in Aix-en-Provence, immediately commencing its surrealist guerilla street assault under titles such as The Mysteries of the Big Freezer and Terror in the Elevator.

“I first met Jean-Luc in Toulouse,” says the company’s original costume designer Marilou Mayeur, drawing heavily on a cigarette.

Mayeur has witnessed the exponential growth of Royal de Luxe from the frontline. “(When they began) they were idealists and completely absurd. Crazy. They were homeless and begging on the street so I invited them to stay with me.

“They were so crazy … I had to join. We ended up living in Toulouse in a squat, an old abandoned chateaux. They were wild days. I could never have known it would become this.”

Mayeur stubs out her cigarette and points to a sprawling 9m-long robe hanging from the ceiling. “I was 23 then. I’m now 55,” she says. “I always knew that what we’d do would be great. This was a unique company. We were ­always going to be revolutionary. And we have proved that.”

Idealistic but a virtual vagabond, Courcoult in 1989 placed an advertisement in a national newspaper seeking a patron for Royal de Luxe and soon after received a call from the mayor of Nantes. Royal de Luxe could have annual funding and free run of an abandoned heritage warehouse (an old rice treatment factory) on the banks of the Loire. There was only one requirement: to help re-imagine a neglected old port city as a cultural capital of Europe.

Nantes today is just that — elegant and cultivated, with a palpable innovative energy. And the fingerprints of Royal de Luxe are everywhere, from the The Wall Fallen from the Sky (a permanent city-centre installation detailing the city’s storied history) to Machines of the Isle of Nantes, an outdoor exhibition of giant creations rom La Machine, a Royal de Luxe breakaway group.

Nantes was always going to be a suitable cerebral coupling for Courcoult and the apparently boundless enterprise of his imagination. As the birthplace of Jules Verne, the pre-eminent coloniser of fictive chimera and a critical reference point for Courcoult’s own endeavours, the city has long been a crucible of exploration and fantasy. Verne may well have predestined his protege when he opined, in Around the World in Eighty Days: “Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.”

Once a polestar for the exotic trade in both slaves and rum, it was from here Louis Antoine de Bougainville set off on his extraordinary voyage to discover the peregrine utopias of the South Pacific. His biting curiosity would drive him further beyond, to the earth’s final frontier — Terra Australis Incognita. But a mighty fortress of rock and coral would shepherd him back: the Great Barrier Reef. And it was in Nantes where a ship christened the Medusa would be constructed, a vessel whose dystopian fate was so terrifyingly imagined in Theodore Gericault’s 19th century painting The Raft of The Medusa, which hangs in the Louvre.

“(Courcoult’s) mind is overflowing,” the company’s resident inventor Jean-Yves Aschard says. Charged with the seemingly impossible assignment of physically manifesting Courcoult’s illusions, Aschard says that in his 22 years with the company he’s learned one fundamental lesson: “‘No’ is not a word Jean-Luc recognises. When he comes to me with ideas he hasn’t got pictures or diagrams. They are just thoughts in his head. So I need to translate this. Build it from nothing.”

Aschard leads me into a warehouse they call the “Museum”, an immense graveyard of scrap metal and bygone inventions decommissioned from the company’s repertoire. It’s a modestly disconcerting spectacle replete with ghoulish dislocated heads, battered mannequins and a 3m-high replica handgun that fires poems. Aschard shows a life-sized metal horse modelled on a vintage miniature wind-up toy horse that gallops.

“Jean-Luc said, ‘I want a life-sized horse’, so I said, ‘Give me one week’,” he says, laughing and opening the body of his invention. “I went away and built it and when he saw the prototype he said, ‘I want six horses’.”

Powered by a diver’s oxygen tank and a car’s windscreen wiper it appears somewhat crude, but sure enough when he turns it on the horse kicks into life and boorishly gallops through the room. “That is the thrill, to see if it can be done, and it always can.”

Aschard laughs with a mischievous smile. “I like the adventure. There is no precedent to what we do. The job is to build something that doesn’t exist, something that is simply imaginary. Something that is crazy. We bend ideas to breaking point.”

FOR all of Courcoult’s phenomenal output as both director and creator, the Giants remain his monumental achievement. Controlled by cranes and a bespoke system of ropes, pullies and levers operated by a formidable army of up to 40 manipulators per Giant — known as Lilliputians after Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver Travels, and of whose number his daughter Margot is one — the immense creatures are remarkably lifelike.

I meet one they call the Little Black Giant. Its limbs are dislodged and packed in cartons; it’s head is on a shelf, its eyes peacefully shut.

“He is sleeping,” the guide whispers. “They are real, in a sense. Their eyelashes may be made of broom bristles, but they are alive.”

As the sun dissolves into the Atlantic I make my way past the dreamy 17th century castle of the dukes of Brittany, bathed in a kaleidoscopic light installation, and into the city’s enchanting Bouffay district where I meet Susana Ribeiro.

The real-time director (or “captain” as she’s known, in the nautical tradition of the city) of the Giants, Ribeiro has come directly from a meeting with Courcoult where they discussed the Perth show.

“I wouldn’t say it’s easy to work with him, no” the Portuguese artist deadpans.

“He has ideas and, well, those ideas must become reality. I have made the mistake of saying ‘no’ to him twice. But no matter what, I still have the same conviction from when I first met him — I met someone special in the history of theatre. The Giants are a phenomenon. I genuinely miss the Little Girl Giant when I haven’t seen her for a time. She is so beautiful.

“She is made from wood, but sometimes you really swear she is smiling. That she is real. The Giants touch everyone.

“You will never look at your city the same way again.

“Everything has a new scale. Everything has a new perspective. Everything has new meaning.” I mention the existence of Noongar stories of Western ­Australia, that ­giants once roamed their lands.

“Yes, of course,” she replies, earnestly. “The Giants are everywhere, they are in all of us. In every culture. Everywhere we go it’s as though the Giants are coming home.”

The Giants is at the Perth International Arts Festival, February 13-15.