Browsing through Flickr this morning, I happened to spot this image in the photostream of one of my contacts, Victory Rose, who regularly posts delectable images from her hometown of Reykjavik, Iceland.
[Want a bite?, originally uploaded by Victory Rose.]
“Hang on,” I thought “I’ve seen a similar kind of creative car vandalism on a giant scale before….”
In fact, it was about this time last year: in early May 2006, Royal De Luxe visited London with their fabulous, free-ranging giant-puppet performance, The Sultan’s Elephant, which wowed the city with its eerily realistic characters and hyper-real scale.
Turns out that the giant puppets (and their red-liveried actor-technician handlers) also visited Santiago, Chile at the beginning of this year, and Reykjavik recently, with the latest developments in the Giant Saga.
I would have loved to have seen that. I’ve always wanted to visit Iceland. That would have been amazing.
Here’s a fascinating article about Royal De Luxe’s pieces - highly recommended reading.
And here are some YouTube videos from their various performances.
I’d be pretty upset if I returned to my car and found that…
Great picture though, and isn’t that backdrop absolutely amazing?
I haven’t seen Royal de Lux ‘live’ since the early 90s when they did their “La véritable histoire de France”, turning the city of Utrecht upside down for a wonderful couple of days. I was very keen on their kind of ‘total theatre’ and a big fan of Spain’s Las Fura Dels Baus (best known for the opening ceremony of the Barcelona games). The Netherlands have one or two companies like that, but I their more recent productions have become all show and no depth as their popularity grew. I would love to see Royal de Lux or La Fura again, I think/hope their anarchist roots will prevent them from becoming ’shallow’.