Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Monday, May 08, 2006

One element of the emotional bag of party favours I took from The Sultan's Elephant was a desire to devastate London with running battles between wood and steel war-automata. However, the trucks running behind the puppets seemed a noisy and inefficient way to wage war, although perfectly suitable for spectacle. Then it hit me. Dirigibles. Wooden warriors animated by fleets of dirigibles, tethered by steel strings. A mechanic might ask why one would not simply arm the dirigibles. That is why I am an evil genius. The dirigibles' movements would be controlled, it pretty much goes without saying, by mahogany computers. Yes, damn you! Mahogany. An endangered Amazonian hardwood. Running Windows XP. I'm evil.

First contact was with the (hopefully sustainably harvested) wooden spacecraft crashed into Waterloo Place, on Friday evening. It looked gloriously Jules Vernish, if somehow a little fake. I know, it's a crashed rocketship made of wood - verisimilitude is not exactly hydrogen.

In fact, it reminded me specifically of la Nona Hora - I think it's the artifice of the broken pavement. The impact of art on floor.

Returning on Saturday morning, I passed the Elephant and the Girl, sleeping in front of the National Gallery. Perhaps because of the centrality of the location, the crowds were growing as well, and the artefacts themselves were fenced off - too many moving parts, I imagine. There's a limit to how much you can mess up an enormous wooden kinder egg. Unmoving, and cradled by the scorpion arches of their puppeteer machines, they looked parasitised as much as asleep. Even inanimate, though, the backdrop of the National Gallery gave an impression of their size.

I say passed. Of course, what I mean is "painstakingly negotiated a route planned on the fly at Archway station". Apparently, according to the free paper passed out to commemorate the event (an odd mix of discussions of civic art and really dodgy orientalism, best avoided or ignored), this event had been in the works since 2001. As such, it was particularly masterful of the Tube to cancel half the services running through the centre of London during the largest live theatre event, apparently, in history.

And then Who, beer and DooM, which is still upsetting and inspiring me. On Sunday, predictably, the communication lines were even more disrupted than before. Nonetheless, impressive numbers had made it out - Horse Guards parade was thronged, but empty save the rocket, so over to St. James' Park, to find the Little Girl playing, surrounded by people, balancing children on her arms, manipulated by half a dozen liveried artists. How do you get that job? Each what-next was answered - she danced, smiled, blinked, then held and licked a shovel-sized lollipop with a startling, segmented tongue. As she walked off towards her ship, we headed over for the Mall, looking for the main event. We found , and their respective and respected partners and progeny. And then the elephant heading on to the Mall in what has be one of the great fuck me moments of street theatre. Forty feet high, vast legs rising and falling, with a float behind playing electric guitar and bagpipes (I know, but it worked). From the house build into its side emerged dancing girls, a eunuch, various dignitaries, the reporter (glorious in deerstalker, tweed sports coat and tartan breeches - in essence, the whole thing felt like a David Bowie concert from around the period of Lodger, as it might have been perceived from the inside of David Bowie's head.

The finale was perhaps inevitably underwhelming, after the sheer joyful impossibility of a crowd following alongside a giant robot elephant. A gigantic conjuring trick is still a conjuring trick. But the swelling, thundering build, and the sense of excitement in the crowd, was perhaps the real trick. Big love for the crowd, incidentally - in a crush of thousands, there was, at least around me, scarcely a jostle or a cross word - people pushed buggies, carried tinies on their backs, and everyone got on famously. The only cross words came from a middle-aged and rather rude French woman who complained that I was blocking her view, and that she had been waiting for half an hour. Given that I had only just arrived and was getting a better view of the elephant, that did seem a bit unfair. Quite funny, though.

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