I was thinking of the paradox of working in communication of how to help generate positive surprise...consistently. So I was interested to read in ‘Daniel Gilber’s Stumbling on Happiness’ is that people are the only creatures capable of imagining what happens next.
In my purposeful procrastination I revisited the catalogue of ‘Le Grand Repertoire: Machines de Spectacle’. It was one of the best events I went to this summer. For most of August, the Grand Palais in Paris was filled with over 120 useless machines. Well, kind of useless, as they were machines made or recycled objects that are/have been used by french street theatre companies over the last 50 years. As each machine is unique, they are catalogued ‘unintellectually’ in four groups : small, medium, large and gigantic.
The machines’ names tend to be very functional : machine to make apples with the bite of Catherine Deneuve ; machine to produce smoke ; catapult to throw a piano ; moving bath; machine to break glasses ; chicken piano ; machine to create six romans for two actors ; machine to walk like an egyptian……and so on.
Unsurprisingly, my vote for the most impressive and prolific company went the ROYAL DU LUXE – they are behind the ‘Sultan’s elephant’ visit to London last year . I liked the philosophy (putting his media strategy at the beginning of the process) of its main machine builder – Jean-Luc Courcoult : use a town as the theatre to tell a story to the whole population – either directly or through word of mouth.
I found the machines of ROYAL DU LUXE the most spectacular. The most famous machine is ‘the Giant’, a machine that is 10 meters high, weighs 40 tons, needs at least 8 people to make him move and is preceded by a parade or similarly enormous creations.
I liked the fact that although they must have been planning this exhibition for a while, this most famous machine was missing from the exhibition and was replaced by a miniature replica. When I googled it, I found him parked on a chair with his feet in a river by the famous Pont du Gard. A fantastic sight. He clearly couldn’t be bothered to show up in Paris. How French !
My favourite machine was the ‘machine to spread nutella on bread slices’. The company that created it – Monique – had a very different philosophy : ‘our machines must be impractical. They exist to tell poetic stories.’ The machine took about 15 minutes to spread – not too efficiently – some nutella on a slice of bread for the delight of a child sitting at the end of the machine covered by two small theatrical curtains. His face at the end of the 15 minute was the best proof I could think of to evaluate the machine’s effectiveness.
I liked three things about these machines :
- their brand is built by what they do, not what they think or say
- they are the tool for telling the story, not the story itself
- they have the capacity to make you dream, but what you dream is up to you
Thinking about the two companies I ended up picking, they seem to fit with the 'stereotype' of the positively suprising ads; those which are either spectacular or very human and funny. Does this make my conclusions unsurprising? Damn.
