Generik Vapeur are one of France’s largest street theatre companies. Their show Bivouac (the one with oil drums being pushed down the streets by a tribe of people in heavy blue make-up and grey suits) is a masterclass in how to whip up an audience and create a powerful, if temporary, experience. The set-piece ending is a bit daft but the parade that precedes it is joyously anarchic.
Sadly Waterlitz was more like the set-piece ending than the unpredictable parade.
The show’s focus is a huge man made from shipping containers, some stood on end to make his legs and one smaller one that swivels around and makes his head at the top. He’s a modern day version of the Wicker Man.
A rock band takes the stage and it all kicks off. We’re going to get a run-down of history and man’s place in history. So to start things off a pterodactyl puppet mounted on a crane flies overhead. The puppet is quite well-made but it comes in flying backwards because, it seems, no one has bothered to solve the problem of how to stop things hanging by a thread from twisting around.
Images are projected onto the man and aerialists abseil from him. A bagpipe player is lifted up high on a cherry picker. A nicely made Bleriot plane swings round on the crane trailing glittery confetti as does a mini with, God help us, a Carnaby Street punk singing God Save the Queen. Robin Hood made an appearance as did several other entirely clichéd English stereotypes. The containers that formed the man’s belly opened up to reveal passengers on deck. The Titanic appeared on a crane to warn us about where this was all leading.
It’s easy to be cynical but it was difficult to detect any connections between the various images. I used to see the People Show in the 70s who had a similar approach – a collective of artists coming up with a theme/location and jamming as many different ideas into it as possible. The difference being that the People Show had interesting ideas and generally knew how to connect them together. The gulf between the enormous production costs and the paucity of the content in Waterlitz was jarring.