When
French street theatre fabulists Transe Express go wandering along Princes
Street as part of Edinburgh’s Hogmanay this year, it’s unlikely they will be
missed by the thousands of revellers who will make up their accidental audience
at the night’s main street party. Using giant structures, aerial interventions
and a mixture of captivating visuals and operatic arias, the company will bring
more than thirty years’ experience of making a spectacle of themselves to see
out the old year in style. This will form part of the event’s We Love You strand,
designed to celebrate the importance of Europe’s cultural connections.
“It
should be very beautiful,” says Transe Express’s international production
manager Nicole Dittmar Ragaigne of the company’s programme for Edinburgh’s
Hogmanay, produced by the London-based Underbelly company. “We know there will
be a lot going on in Princes Street, and the only thing we can’t be sure of is
how people will respond. We hope they will stop for a little bit and enjoy the
interventions, but we will see.”
Transe
Express will present a suite of performances with very different elements over
the course of the evening. Giant Dolls sees a trio of opera singers placed in
oversize structures, singing French arias as they’re paraded through the
street. These will be accompanied by Les Tambours, a group of sinister looking
drummers dressed as toy soldiers who provide an array of global beats to give
the party bounce.
Cranes
will be in attendance to lift the drummers up into the night sky for Mobile
Homme, in which the performers are dangled from on high like as a child’s
mobile would. Transe Express will be accompanied by Edinburgh-based All or
Nothing Aerial Dance company, who will end the early part of the evening with a
routine choreographed to the opening number by Concert in the Gardens
headliners Franz Ferdinand.
All
or Nothing’s involvement as part of this two-way artistic traffic forms part of
PLACE (Platforms for Creative Excellence), a new three-year initiative backed
by the Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and the Edinburgh
Festivals. The partnership will invest £400,000 in bringing leading
international artists such as Transe Express to Edinburgh, where they can
collaborate with home-grown companies such as All or Nothing, founded in 2006
by Jennifer Paterson, and based at the Out of the Blue Drill Hall in Leith.
“We
have two days to work together,” says Ragaigne. “During that time we can each find
out about the other company, and learn from each other about how we do this
type of work.”
Transe
Express are no strangers to Edinburgh’s Hogmanay, having performed there on
more than one occasion in the 1990s when its Edinburgh-based founders Unique
Events were in charge. This was a period when an array of European street
artists were regular visitors to Scotland’s capital. At times it felt like fellow
travellers including pyrotechnic magicians Groupe F and inflatable and
marionette auteurs Plasticiens Volants were permanent fixtures. Operating separately,
such companies produced a series of quietly subversive sleight-of-hand
spectacles that put hardcore avant-garde actions into a civic context. Seen en
masse, this at times resembled a scaled-up rave which had broken cover from the
underground.
As the
focus was shifted into promoting a wealth of Scottish artists, such
larger-than-life internationalist interventions seemed to fall off the Edinburgh
calendar just as the rest of the world was catching up. With Transe Express
looming large on Princes Street this year, a refreshed anarchic spirit will see
other European companies doing their various things along the way. This will
include French peers Compagnie des Quidams leading a procession of white
horses, while Spain’s El Carromato will present a set of giant dancing puppets,
and Dutch theatre company Close Act will feature a set of performers on stilts.
Having
such an array of international talent on our doorstep raises the unavoidable
question of Brexit, and how such international exchanges might be affected
after whatever deal is put in place by the UK government next March. Fears have
already been voiced by the directors of various Edinburgh festivals, and
several authors due to appear at this year’s Edinburgh International Book
Festival were refused visas. For Transe Express too, the future looks
uncertain.
“It’s
too early to tell what might happen,” says Ragaigne. “but I hope it won’t
change things a great deal. At the moment everything is really easy for us to
go wherever we want to and work, but I have no idea if that will continue.”
Transe Express was
founded in 1982 by dancer and choreographer Brigitte Burdin and sculptor Gilles
Rhode after travelling with street-art companies Saldingbande and Podingo as
well as new circus troupes La Toile Filante and Cirque Bidon. As they developed
ideas of what they styled as intervention theatre at a small level working by
themselves, their success saw them expand, eventually deciding to take to the
air in order that their now large audiences could see them.
The company’s
high-profile performances at the 1992 Olympic Games in Albertville in the south
of France caught the world’s eye, and they went on to become the go-to company for
large-scale spectaculars. With Edinburgh ahead of the game, Transe Express
performed at the opening of the Sydney Festival in 2002 and 2005, the World Ski
Championships in Val d’Isere in 2009 and the Santiago a Mil International
Theatre Festival in Chile in 2011.
Today, with a rolling
company of as many as 150 artists to call on, Transe Express have performed almost
eighty bespoke creations in more than fifty countries across five continents. With
a repertoire of a dozen permanent shows, the company have remained based in the
Rhone Alps region of France, where they also run La Gare a Coulisses, a centre
for street arts, containing rehearsal and development space for resident
companies and an outdoor theatre for work to be shared. One can only speculate
on the value of a similar resource for the likes of All or Nothing.
As if
to illustrate the festival circuit that now exists in the UK on a par with the
rest of Europe, over the last year, Transe Express have appeared in Norwich and
Halifax, and have performed at Galway International Festival in Ireland on two
occasions. As for Edinburgh’s Hogmanay, the love affair looks set to continue.
“Expect
something spectacular,” says Ragaigne. “And beautiful.”
Transe
Express will appear at the Street Party, Edinburgh’s Hogmanay, December 31.
The Herald, December 24th 2018
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