Camac recently lent this silver electric harp for La Machine's tour of Japan, which featured Liverpool-based English harpist Rachael Gladwin (pictured left).
La Machine is a French company making mechanised installations and shows: what they call les mé
photo: Matthew Andrews
La Princesse was followed by a band of musicians, playing semi-composed, semi-improvised music. This is where the harp came in, as Rachael was engaged to play. Like Joanna Newsom and Seffa Steer, Rachael is one of a growing band of singer-songwriters who are carving a real niche for the harp in this field: see her website, www.rachaelgladwin.co.uk. Her band, The Red Socks ("get your socks off, get your socks off, honey"), are an upbeat world-jazz-folk combo: check out their myspace here.
Rachael and the Red Socks
To return to the music for La Machine, Rachael and her colleagues followed La Princesse throughout Liverpool and sought musically to capture the mood of whatever the giant spider was doing at the time. "We did have a vague idea of where she was going next", says Rachel, "but nothing exact, and we had to react to what she was doing as we followed her about. We followed her perched in a series of moving cherry-pickers, forty feet high in the air, and communicated with our conductor via headphones." You can imagine the organisation that went into this, but it came off brilliantly. The British broadsheet newpaper The Guardian described the spider thus:
"She waved her massive legs at the crowd and they waved back, she sprayed water and the crowd begged for more, and when she was caught in a snowstorm and went to sleep in the middle of the main retail area, the audience gave out a great collective sigh of pleasure as if they had all been given a precious free gift. It turned out to be a very bad day for shopping, but a great day for art."
photo: Matthew Andrews
In April 2009, the show went on tour to Japan. What was going to happen was kept secret beforehand, but afterwards, the La Machine team kindly sent us this report!
Return ticket to Yokohama...
The last components that make up The Princess (Spider 1) were finally arranged in containers, ready to return to Nantes by sea. Her alter ego, Spider 2, will stay in Yokohama for 150 days, for the greater delight of the Japanese public. But before this disassembly phase, we performed Act 2 of the Mécaniques Savantes in the course of four great days.
After a knowing striptease and a few "taming" scenes, The Princess was to take a bath, not yet knowing that the following day she would meet another mécaniques savante, made in her image...
"This
morning at 0345, Takeshi Tanabe-san, a retired fisherman from Yokohama aged 68, cast his fishing line as usual into the
historic port - said to rest on the trunk of an elephant - of Yokohama.
The cocoon that you can see in the water is the result of his
miraculous fishing."
In
the image of our Franco-Japanese collaboration, the relationship with the
Japanese public began subtly. From our spiders' first frightened looks
to the most beautiful smiles, it was an enchanting meeting.
On the evening of the fourth day, the spiders were separated, and boldly saluted their hosts. Components were disconnected. Fire, snow and water accompanied their ballet until they reached the sea...
À bientôt,
La Machine, Yokohama, April 30th, 2009.
