I found this set of photos on Pete Woodhead’s Flickr photos. Its photos he took at the performance Royal de Luxe did in London of The Sultan’s Elephant.
Royal de Luxe are an extraordinary European street theatre company, renowned on three continents but hardly known here in Britain. The company was founded in 1979 by Jean Luc Courcoult, and has been touring the world ever since.
In the past dozen years, they have created a series of spectacular shows involving giant figures and puppets, some as big as 11 or 12 metres high. The shows are very simple and run over a few days. The animal or giant arrives in the town, and lives its life. It goes about its day to day life and interacts with passers-by.
By the end of the performance huge crowds gather to watch the visiting creature and its daily activities. The sheer size of the puppets is enough to amaze adults and children alike as the story of the Sultan and his Elephant unravelled…
“Once upon a time, there lived a sultan who was tormented in his dreams by visions of a little girl who was travelling through time. This is his story, incredible but true.
The sultan could no longer sleep, his growing anguish diverting his attention from affairs of state. In order to cure his sickness, and believing that he would find the girl in the land of dreams, he commissioned an unknown engineer living in 1900 to construct a time-travelling elephant. A few months later, the sultan set off with his court in search of the little giant, which, in the course of his nightmares, had been transformed into a marionette 5 metres high.
The trip was awful, but they found a series of clues as to her wherabouts. The giant loved sewing -
she liked to stitch cars to the tarmac, boats to quaysides, trains to railway tracks and sometimes even envelopes to letterboxes.
The elephant followed the trail left by the puppeteers. And as in all love stories, strange things began to happen. Such was his happiness at getting closer to her, he began to expel hundreds of living birds which disappeared into the sky in a burst of joy.”
The performance started on the 4th of May.. London was shocked to find a rocket crashed nose first into Waterloo Place.. Smoke rising and the road crumbled and broken under it.
The following days saw the puppets interact with London. The giant puppet girl emerging from the rocket in Waterloo Place on Friday afternoon, and the giant elephant wandering majestically around London. The weekend performance ending on the Sunday, with the girl climbing back into the rocket and blasting off from Horse Guards Parade in St James Park.
The Sultan’s Elephant is the fifth in the series of giant pieces, the others being Le Géant tombé du ciel, Le géant tombé du ciel: dernier voyage, Retour d’Afrique and Les Chasseurs de girafes.
La visite du sultan des Indes sur son éléphant à voyager dans le temps
was first performed in Nantes from May 19th to 22nd and in Amiens from June 16th to 19th 2005.
There are some fantastic photos of this on the Flickr Royal de Luxe cluster. Which really makes me wish I’d known this was on. The attention to detail, the pure size of the puppets and the amazing interaction with the public is something that I really love.
Unfortunately there is no information as to if Royal De Luxe will be performing elsewhere within the UK at any time..
UPDATE: I’ve just had a look on youtube and there is a bunch of videos from the performances round London, including the Grande Finale
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