Presenting La Machine, Liverpool’s most memorable European Capital of Culture event produced by Artichoke and technically co-ordinated by Unusual, was a massive challenge. Unusual proved that an energetic mix of lateral and innovative thinking, technical expertise, close teamwork and engaging individuals with a dynamic range of skills and personalities from a wide variety of backgrounds to get behind the project can be a hugely rewarding exercise.
Artichoke & Unusual
Over the past six years, the working relationship between Artichoke Productions and Unusual has steadily developed. Included in the portfolio was the spectacular visit of The Sultan and the Elephant to London in May 2006. Unusual provided site and production services for the largest piece of street theatre ever to visit a capital city. It attracted over a million people to the streets of London. The Elephant was 12.5 metres high, 7.2 metres wide and weighed over 40 tonnes. Enabling Royal de Luxe to manoeuvre safely around the streets of Central London underlined Unusual’s strength in technical and logistics planning.
Where do you go from there? More adventurous?
This inevitably prompts questions such as what, why, when, where and how? The opportunity presented itself with Liverpool’s status of European Capital of Culture. This takes care of the ‘why, when and where’.
What?
Once again, a piece of exceptional street theatre. There is a building in Liverpool due for demolition. Within it, it seems that there is a large spider, which manages to get out and attach itself to the outside. A team of scientists are sent to investigate and they decide that it is best to examine the creature in a controlled environment. They move it, but it wants to get back to its home and repeatedly tries to escape. The scientists discover that the creature can be controlled and tamed by elemental forces such as fire, water, smoke, light, noise, wind and snow. Seven machines are created to generate these environments. The creature also responds to music and is subsequently accompanied by a band of 26 live musicians wherever it moves. In attempting to escape, the spider is cornered by seven effects machines. It seeks refuge in the Birkenhead tunnel, never to be seen again.
How?
It’s all about people. A small team of producers/directors needs to drive the project; there are those who deliver the project; there are those who accommodate and host it and then there is the audience.
When examining what goes on in the live entertainment and creative industries, there is very little work being presented, which can genuinely attract the tag of ‘innovative, new or adventurous’. Much depends on the relationship of creativity and vision with the ever present hurdles of risk and finance. It’s this vision that is required by the project leaders. They also require a large dose of courage and tenacity.
The starting point is inevitably the creative idea. Francois Delaroziere is the creative director of La Machine. La Machine was formed in the early 1990s as a collaboration between artists, designers, fabricators and technicians. The company creates extraordinary theatrical machines, permanent installations, and also its own theatrical productions.
La Machine has created many theatrical machines including the series of giants for Royal de Luxe. Over a period of 15 years, from 1991 – 2006, Delarozière and his engineers designed and created a host of huge performing creatures, which walked the streets of European cities, the characters including Giraffes, Rhino and the giant Gulliver. Most famous to British audiences was the Sultan’s Elephant which transfixed audiences in London during its visit in May 2006.
In 2003 La Machine launched their show Symphonie Mécanique, a collaboration with composer Dominique Malan in which classically-trained musicians perform with industrial machines to create a live theatrical event. Symphonie Mécanique has been seen in cities all over France and in Spain, and will be in Paris at the end of September.
In 2003 the company created Le Grand Répertoire, a theatrical exhibition of extraordinary machines created for public places. It was seen in Nantes, Calais, Antwerp, Toulouse, and Marseille, and was visited by 50,000 people in Paris in 2006.
In 2007, Delaroziere and long-term collaborator Pierre Orefice opened Les Machines de L’Ile on the site of an old shipbuilding yard at the edge of the River Loire. A gallery containing models and designs for many of their machines is open to the public, together with a giant mechanical elephant on which members of the public can ride. In 2010 they will open another permanent attraction there, Le Carrousel du Monde Marins, a merry-go-round of fish and sea creatures.
Earlier this year they created Le Manège Carré Sénart, a square merry-go-round of insects and buffalo, commissioned by the town of Sénart, just outside Paris. It will visit Madrid later this year and St Petersburg, Russia, in 2009.
La Machine is based in two locations: in Tournefeuille, near Toulouse, and also in Nantes, in Brittany.
Having presented The Sultan & The Elephant in London, the directors of Artichoke Productions, Helen Marriage & Nicky Webb, kept in touch with Francois and secured his latest show for Liverpool 08. Artichoke works in unusual places: in streets, public spaces or in the countryside. They don’t believe the arts should take place only behind the closed doors of our theatres and art galleries. Instead, they put on shows that, though ambitious and complex, have something to say to the widest possible audience. Helen & Nicky are highly respected figures in the Arts and received ‘Woman of the Year’ awards in 2006. In landing this prestigious artistic coup, the twin tasks remained to find a technical team to assist in the delivery of the event whilst seeking agreement that Liverpool would accept the challenge of hosting the event.
The slightest whiff of a challenge brought about early discussions between Helen Marriage and Alan Jacobi, MD of Unusual – a company with a strong theatre background and a willingness to take on something different. Unusual has over 50 employees with a depth of technical experience, expertise and commitment, which matches the level of excellence of the creative partners. Like Artichoke, they specialise in events in unconventional places and particularly for large audiences. Tenacity is most definitely an attribute of Alan Jacobi and his team.
The well matched delivery team was in place. Francois, Helen, Nicky and Alan. The successful outcome of such an adventurous project would rely on a positive attitude throughout the team and a magnetic tendency towards solutions rather than problems. In timescale terms, there was about 18 months to go before the event.
Hosting the project.
Although the origin of the project was a commission from Liverpool 08, the hosting of this event was not a ‘done deal’. A project of this nature doesn’t necessarily fit into any city. It has to work creatively and the producers had to feel secure that it was going to be possible from a financial, technical and logistical point of view. The whole project had to be custom built and eventually, outline agreement was achieved in December 2007 and work commenced.
This was a brave move, because the largest event of the Liverpool 08 cultural programme was perversely enough, the event about which they could say the least. A key component for this particular project was the element of surprise, so very little information got into the public domain before the event, apart from the fact that an awful lot of people knew that something was going to happen but nobody was quite sure what. 21st century communication works very fast indeed. From a few curious faces on the first of the four days in London, when the Elephant arrived, there were a million people on the streets on the final day. If there is something strange going on, people will find it. Much the same happened in Liverpool.
Cities such as London are used to large scale events and the subsequent ramifications. Within London government agencies and authorities, they include streamlined resources to accommodate such occurrences. Where cities do not have so many large events, there is less need for such focused resources and as a result, this new production had to slot into Liverpool’s existing client, council, agency and authority structures.
Twin challenges
The first challenge was the sheer number of people in Liverpool, who would become involved in one way or another in the hosting of the event. It was about four times more than one might expect in London. Behind the scenes, further consultations took place within individual organisations, hence increasing the number of people in the communication loop. Generally speaking, the majority of people in this type of work tend towards caution and are risk averse, so the producer’s task of laying peoples doubts to rest and explaining about the project became much harder than would have been expected. Just as it was in London, the moment that individuals get on board, nothing is too much to do and enthusiasm becomes the watchword. This becomes infectious and even though there might be an occasional ‘wobble’, an extended group of people end up joining an unforgettable adventure.
The second of the challenges was that this was to be the World Premiere of a new show. This poses a broad range of problems. Some of them are technical and up to a point, are within the comfort zone of the creative and production teams. One of the more significant problems relates to vision. When Artichoke and Unusual presented The Sultan and the Elephant in London, the show was already in existence. The main agency and authority stakeholders were invited to see the show in Nantes, where universally, everybody understood and bought into the project. Where Liverpool was concerned, no such luxury existed so, once again, a lot of people took a commendable leap of faith.
Technical
The technical specification from La Machine was extremely detailed, and incidentally in French, which is understood and spoken in both Artichoke and Unusual. However, the detail would undergo extensive alteration in the later stages of pre-production. The specification broke down into five main sections: the provision of resources for the build site, the requirements for the show sites, the spider, the effects machines and the music.
The build site.
This project was riddled with complex technical problems and the build site was the first. All the show content would be trucked over from France, with one week to build and three weeks to rehearse prior to show week. Little imagination is required to work out how much space would be required. In an ideal world, a space would have been identified near to Liverpool city centre. Unfortunately, all of the sites would have required substantial expenditure to provide a suitable working environment. The perfect location was just across the river at Cammell Laird in Birkenhead. This then meant that the entire show content had to be transferred to the city centre either above or below the Mersey. The Birkenhead (Queensway) tunnel was selected, more people got involved, surveys were carried out and the specification for the main show element, the spider, was amended to ensure that it would fit through the tunnel.
In itself, Cammell Laird was the perfect venue for building and rehearsing the show elements. Although largely disused, a thorough clean up quickly made the place habitable. An enormous covered workspace was in existence in the form of the ship building shed. Inside it, the Mess Room was cleaned up and Eat to the Beat moved in to provide production catering for the team. Power Logistics brought in site wide generators, distribution and power management. A few cabins and temporary toilets completed the site infrastructure.
With the completion of the infrastructure for the build, the team from La Machine arrived in the form of fifteen 40ft trucks, one tanker, numerous vans, mopeds and scooters, an assortment of bicycles and a crew of 60. Unusual Rigging had a further ten 40’ trucks. Numerous generators of every shape and size and a phenomenal amount of plant added to the inventory of kit on site. In all likelihood, this was to be the most complex show build that anyone on-site had ever taken part in.
The focus of the show is the spider. Weighing around 20 tonnes and with a legspan of 15 metres, it arrived in pieces and was re-assembled over a period of 3 days. Already a subject of extensive testing in Nantes, this part of the show was effectively complete and ready to go.
The show included seven effects machines – snow, wind, water, light, noise, flame and smoke. Arriving in various stages of completion, there was a considerable amount of work involved in assembly and commissioning. The technical specification was detailed and changeable during the testing process. Unusual had to look after the variety of plant, power, water and gas requirements.
As if the spider and effects machines were not adventurous enough, the whole approach to how music would be used was unconventional at best. Take 26 musicians. Split them up and give them performing spaces in the form of four adapted forklift trucks, eight cherry pickers and a 40ft truck. Each forklift included a PA system and fixed sites had separate line arrays. During the performance, the forklifts and cherry pickers moved around. This effectively meant that the requirement was for 12 independently powered, people carrying performance spaces. The music was all especially composed and unsurprisingly, this was very much an evolutionary process. The more the show was rehearsed, the more the composer would be changing the score to fit the show. At the best of times, this process can be a challenge in the studio, but when the band is scattered in a variety of moving equipment in mid air, this adds a new level of complexity.
Rehearsals
In theatre, the creative side of the business is accustomed to working with the technicians and vice versa. However, this project broke down the boundaries to include plant operators, truck drivers and crane operators to be part of the creative delivery process. In their normal day to day existence, these people probably only get to use 50% of their skills but on a project like this they really get to shine. Without exception, every single one of them had the time of their lives!
Another comparison with the theatre is worth consideration. The missing element in the rehearsal period is the audience. The saving grace in the theatre is the fact that the number of people and their location is more or less a known factor. One of the key problems with the spider is that the footprint of the show with all the effects and musicians was massive. The audience attendance figures, profile and location were subject to intelligent guesswork.
Rehearsing a project of this scale, supposedly in secret to keep an element of surprise, obviously not in the correct location and with no idea of audience levels constituted a perverse level of insanity.
One of the hardest aspects of the rehearsal period was for the on-board operators to get used to working together and to get the animation of the spider as close to realistic as possible.
Interestingly enough, some of the TV footage was shown in fast forward and the spider looked far too real for comfort! All the effort in rehearsals obviously paid off.
Performance
The weather couldn’t have been wetter. Bowing to the inevitable journalistic platitude – It certainly didn’t dampen the enthusiasm or size of the audience. Depending on whose statistics you use, considerably more than 3 people showed up or attendance was in the hundreds of thousands. Anyway, it didn’t pay to need to go anywhere in a hurry when the spider was around.
Exactly what happened over the performance days is best described in photographs and film. As is the case nowadays, the internet is well populated with content on sites like flickr and youtube. Such a visual event can’t easily be described in words.
There was a story line, which was broadcast every day by Joseph Browning, the spokesperson for La Machine. Audiences bought into it, waited in their masses, enjoyed it and went home smiling. As street theatre goes, it doesn’t get much better. Job done!
