Toulouse: “It passed between 70,000 and 100,000 people, at the Halle de la Machine, this weekend”
The day after the two days of shows around the mare-dragonne Long-Ma, at the Halle de la Machine, François Delarozière draws up an initial assessment. The artistic director of Cie La Machine is delighted with this crazy weekend.
In the aftermath of this crazy weekend, how do you show yourself?
I am obviously happy and relieved to the extent that this weekend has been a success. The team is tired because the rhythms were sustained, but the atmosphere was very good and the audience quite extraordinary. During these two days, we experienced something quite happy. Even the weather was with us, the weather was very nice, it was as if the sky had opened up for everything to go well. Everyone got sunburned.
Do you have an idea of the attendance over the two days?
It’s hard to say because it was very moving. People were arriving for the scenes and the audience was getting bigger at that time, after that it was more dispersed. Even if Saturday evening, we had a little less people than we imagined, the afternoon and the morning, it was the opposite. In the end, we must not be very far from our estimates since we think that it passed between 70,000 and 100,000 people at the Halle de la Machine, during the weekend. Over two days, we had nearly 6,000 admissions to the Halle de la Machine. That’s great !
Where are they distributed from?
For the occasion, 160 volunteers came to help us with this whole project. Some were from Calais, Lille, Paris, Nantes, Drôme, Marseille, Nice in addition to Toulouse. We even had an American who traveled especially for the project. He sent a photo to the United States and the next day, a person to take a plane during the day, from Los Angeles, to come to see the show. It’s anecdotal and crazy at the same time. Many people came from afar and stayed all day. We also saw a lot of people from Nantes, Spaniards, Canadians, they spoke all the languages, it was nice.
How do you explain such success?
We are starting to be followed. Many people took part in the adventure of the Dragon in Calais, they want to relive these emotions. Some people from Nantes were frustrated because they had seen the dragonne mare Long-Ma during her outings on the forecourt of our workshop, without really enjoying it. So they came to see her on stage. Somehow people appreciated that the show was free. They thanked us for this time offered in the public space, which makes us look up and get closer. We talk, we smile, we talk, we laugh. There is something of the order of generosity, of simple happiness. We had a very family audience where parents and children shared a common emotion. It’s a language that touches us all, whether you’re an engineer, a teacher, a worker… Within the team, Long-Ma’s new eye manipulator said that she herself had been taken by the ’emotion. Must say that the dragonne mare is a very expressive machine.
Long-Ma is quite impressive as a machine…
Yes, it is orchestrated by Yves Rollot, from which all the manipulators start moving. They know when to open their mouths, turn their heads… and it sticks. From April 19, trips to the Long-Ma temple are offered.
This time, it is the presence of Long-Ma in Toulouse which was the pretext for this show.
Given the success of this weekend, can we envisage a meeting of the same type every two years?
It’s a big bet that we are making today on the Montaudran site. Somewhere, we could even do a show of this type every year, but everything will depend on the evolution of the site. We totally produced the show on the cultural program of the Halle and it was a risk.