It's September 2008 and something is lurking on the drab exterior
of a derelict city centre office…something very large and something that has
eight legs. It has appeared overnight to startle early morning commuters
already battling with high winds and lashing rain. Emerging from the train
station below they can only gasp at the sight above their heads and in seconds
mobile phones and cameras are clicking, people are talking, local radio and TV
reporters are hovering about. On first glance the object appears to be some
sort of Victorian era machine made of metal with the appearance of a spider;
sat on the side of the office block it seems to have no purpose and puzzles
onlookers.
There had been word of a unique piece of
street theatre that would debut a couple of days later- was this part of it or
something else? The more people gawp, the more obvious it became that this
whatever-it-was is no machine and no abstract creation either but a creature
that demands to be brought to life like some fugitive from a Tim Burton movie.
It’s huge as well; even semi curled across several floors of the building in a
shape that suggests it will crawl down any moment. Hey, didn’t it just move a fraction?
Nah that was the wind. Are you sure….
2008 has been Liverpool’s year as European
Capital of Culture, a title celebrated before anyone really knew what it meant.
In truth the civic leaders only decided to enter the bid as a way of gleaning
good publicity for a city that only seemed to make the news when something bad
was happening. Even when Liverpool was short listed nobody really thought it
would win but it did. The obligatory organisational spats, doom laden
predictions of failure and financial woes ensued after the honour was bestowed
but once the year got going it has proved itself to be rather wonderful. There
really has been culture of every kind on display- music, art, theatre and even
lambbananas yet one event had appeared on the calendar yet remained
tantalisingly shrouded in mystery. Billed simply as La Machine and advertised enigmatically, it wasn’t until that early
damp September morning of the spider’s appearance straddling the soon to be
demolished Concourse Tower that things became clearer. This was to be something
different.
In fact, La Machine are the name of the
company who made the creature. A French outfit formed in the early 1990s as a
collaboration between the artistic and technical disciplines La Machine
specialise in ambitious theatrical constructions, permanent installations and
productions. Their speciality though lies with enormous creatures and past
triumphs include a gigantic rhino, Giraffes, Gulliver and most famously the
Sultan’s Elephant which came to London in 2006. They also have their own show Symphonie Mecanique, a collaboration
with the composer Dominique Malan in which classical musicians perform with
industrial machines.
The company’s artistic director is
Francois Delaroziere who lists his influences as Leonardo da Vinci, Jules Verne, Gustave Eiffel, Antonio Gaudi, surrealism, Dadaism
but also everyday architecture, bridges, shipyards or railway bridges. “My
father was a cabinet-maker, but he also built houses,” he says on the company’s
website “That’s how I came to brickwork, to plumbing, welding and mechanics.
But I think what inspires me most is a study of nature; before I invent, I
observe life.”
Now in 2008
they are debuting La Princess. It’s easy to list the facts about this enormous
arachnid- it’s fifty foot high, weighs thirty seven tonnes and is made from
steel and reclaimed poplar. It took a year to construct at a cost of
£1.8million and contains fifty hydraulic axes of movement. Its five days stay
in Liverpool involve sixteen cranes, six forklift trucks, eight cherry pickers,
sixty six French personnel, a 250 strong support team and twenty British
musicians. As it moves, twelve engineers sit at retro-futuristic controls like
scientists from a scary vision of the future.
Equally all of those facts tell you
precisely nothing about it. Indeed, rather than focus on such certainty, La
Machine have constructed a story for its new pet. That story being that the
spider had always been here and that the demolition work on the tower disturbed
it causing it to clamber up the building. Scientists arrive and take it down to
a base near the city’s recently opened Echo Arena for a series of tests to see
whether it responds to different stimuli. It is able to be sent to sleep by a
snow machine. Later, it wakes and starts to walk about the city centre. It even
has a bath before eventually returning to the tower. On the Sunday, it
disappears into one of the two tunnels underneath the River Mersey and is never
seen again, at least not in these parts. Now this is what really shows that the
event is more than just spectacle; it is theatre. The organisers have homed in
on an already long scheduled demolition project and incorporated it into the
show; in fact as any Liverpool resident will attest it’s the most interesting
thing that ever happened to what was an eyesore of a building.
On day two after a floodlit overnight
snooze the spider; who it is now revealed is female and officially named La
Princess, is hoisted down to be taken by the scientists and upon arrival at the
Arena it wakes up, snaking it’s long metallic legs and being accompanied on its
walkabout by atmospheric accompaniment played by musicians perched on cherry
pickers. Despite the fact that the creature is sitting on a large vehicle and
operators are clearly in view- several in the underbelly and three atop – manipulating
large levers, and there are firecrackers everywhere, the thing still looks
real. Its legs exactly mimic the erratic movement of a spider and they can move
with precision; at one point touching the very top of someone’s umbrella.
Despite the driving rain and the fact it’s a working day, hundreds turn out to
see it waking, lumbering towards the Arena to encounter a barrage of fireworks.
The best way to see it though it when it’s in crawl about mode making its way
around a packed city centre on the Saturday.
Water Street aptly heads towards the River
Mersey, inclining steeply downwards affording a view of the river. When you
look down the street on this windy Saturday the attentions of thousands of
people are caught when a large tentacle appears around the corner. From this
distance and angle there is no sense of machinery, just an exploratory arachnid
discovering a new street. The 2mph speed it travels allows you to saviour the
size and look of La Princess and as it moves past, one of its eight legs passes
over your head. Close up, the metal parts and complex wiring are visible as are
the inscrutable helmeted operators yet this takes nothing from the majesty of
the creature as it seems to walk up the street leaving the crowds in awe. Of
course it doesn’t actually walk but you feel that it does. The musicians play a
hypnotic hybrid of classical and modern music that has the unmistakeable air of
melancholy shaping something of a character for the spider, perhaps reading her
mind and adding to a feeling of other worldliness. Once in a while water
belches from the beast; when it reaches the Town Hall it is festooned in smoke
and a triumphal progress though the city centre takes it back to the Tower. The
route is lined with young and old, all fascinated by this most unusual sight,
all caught up in the large scale drama of the moment. Most will not have taken
the trouble to read the story but they are captivated all the same. It’s War of the Worlds but right there in
front of us.
You did wonder, in an age when everything
is virtual and electronic, how much hold metal, hydraulics and wires could
place on people who must use their imagination to fully appreciate the show but
in this case it is more engaging than any game. After eventually finding her
way back up the side of the building where she first emerged, the spider is
ready for Sunday’s finale. This time after being hoisted down awkwardly from
her perch, La Princess journeys through another, more historical part of the
city. The juxtaposition of this bizarre creature travelling at dusk through
Victorian buildings, trees and tiny pinpricks of light amidst the foliage is as
effective as any film special effect you’ll see. It evokes another time
altogether; the pen of HG Wells himself might have written this.
The final sequence takes place in a large
area in front of the entrance to the Queensway Tunnel, the older of the two
subterranean Mersey crossings. Here, accompanied by ever more dramatic music,
the spider attempts to escape and is festooned with water and then flames which
play on the water vapour to create an image so clear it might almost be light
again. This ending is in the tradition of King
Kong but in place of the heroine who sees the giant ape as more than just
an animal, it’s the watching tightly packed throng of thousands who become
involved. That this much machinery can evoke any kind of story is remarkable
but in five short days it has. Moments later La Princess is gone, under a veil
of snow and spooky red lights, into the yawning tunnel entrance and a pall of
thick white smoke brings down the curtain on this remarkable show. It is
amazingly quite moving to see an event of such scale suffused with such an
emotional core.
There were plenty prepared to be cynical
about this entire project, about the cost, about the traffic disruption and
even the very idea that such a machine could really be up to much. Yet once
people saw it and embraced the idea, it was as if the spider had always been
here and few can fail to have been amazed, enthralled and even moved by its
journey. The way in which the city centre became a giant performance space and
the thought that went into every aspect of the staging was a constant surprise
and it feels somehow as if, wherever La Princess turns up next, there will
always be a special bond between the show and the city in which it was first
staged. If you get the opportunity to catch one of La Machine’s projects you
really must because they are beyond the traditional confines of entertainment,
straddling some hitherto rarely explored place and, for all the workmanship and
technology they utilise, there is a beating heart at the centre of everything
they do.
2024 postscript- This was a special, special event for those of is who witnessed it and its difficult to describe just how spectacular it was, as if the whole city was part of a film. The review above was first published in an issue of This Way Up in its fanzine days complete with the cover below.
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