For some time we had been seeing posters advertising a festival called Op?ra des Rues, which was to take place from September 5th to 7th. The fact that it was labelled "spectacles gratuit" immediately caught my attention, along with the fact that it was to take place in the 13th arrondissement, which is where we live. Actually it was all happening around the trendiest part of the arrondisement, which is two trains and a bus ride from us.
That weekend was already a busy time for us, as we had arranged to spend Saturday in Versailles, and Sunday was free day at the Louvre, but we found we could fit in the opening and closing sessions out of a total of eight listed events.
The first show was called "La Baronnade", performed by a company called "Les Grooms". The venue was the streets of Bercy village, a modern, ultra-trendy shopping and eating area done up to look like a traditional French village, but largely undiscovered by the tourists. The event was due to start at 7 pm, so we thought we would see the show and go home for a late dinner. As soon as we got out of the metro station we saw signs directing us to an enclosed area where it was all to take place. Sure enough we saw several people dressed in red uniforms, with the words "Les Grooms" on their caps, and a crowd of onlookers milling around wondering what was going on.
Eventually a space was cleared and several VIPs started giving speeches, welcoming us to the second annual festival of Op?ra des Rues. As they did so, the grooms stood in a line behind them, looking bored and distracting the audience's attention by swaying from side to side in unison and performing other little mimes, unseen by the speech-makers.
The Mayor eventually gave her speech, then as soon as she had finished she was suddenly surrounded by the men in red, who broke into an a capella love
song, while adopting appropriate poses such as kneeling in front of her or whispering in her ear.
Just as suddenly they were back in line behind the speech-makers and it was the turn of some "musicological expert" to make a speech, which he began very seriously and hesitantly. He had a stack of notes with him which threatened a long boring speech.
After talking long enough for the audience to start getting restless, he abandoned the speech altogether and replaced it with an operatic aria, throwing his pages of notes to the wind as he did so. Obviously this was to be an evening of surprises.
One surprise concerned the tables of food and drinks we saw along the wall. We had assumed these were for the VIPs but it turned out they were for the general public. Delicious dips, marinated mushrooms, chocolate tarts, red and white wine, fruit punch - all you had to do was fight your way through the crowd and help yourself. In the meantime the people in red picked up various instruments and played brass-band music. When they marched out into the street we had to make a choice between following them and continuing to sample the exotic food. Wine-glasses in hand, most people somehow combined both activities.
The surprises continued. The musicians would approach an apparent stranger in the street and invite him or her to join them in a song. After a show of shyness and embarrassment the "stranger" would start to sing in an obviously professional manner. At one point the grooms invaded one of the many restaurants overflowing onto the pedestrian-only street and sat down amongst the diners, who didn't quite know what to make of the situation. A waiter came up and demanded to know what was going on, then suddenly burst into song. The band started up their accompaniment and eventually the whole show moved on, leaving the bewildered diners with something to talk about for the rest of the evening.
Possibly there was some kind of story in all this, but our French wasn't quite up to it so we just enjoyed the music and fun. When it was over we all went back to finish off whatever food remained. The idea of a late dinner was, of course, abandoned.
The following Sunday evening things got off to a very inauspicious start. The program said the event, simply called "op?racont? dans la ville!", was to be held at the corner of two streets - rue Domr?my and rue Dunois, a few blocks from the big new Mitterand Library. We arrived at the announced starting time of 7 pm and once again found several people standing around waiting for something to happen and generally holding up the traffic. After half an hour it began to look like some kind of practical joke and a few people wandered off. Yoong was getting restless and started suggesting we should give up and go home as nothing was happening.
At last a man with a wheelbarrow full of brooms arrived and started yelling things to the crowd - maybe trying to sell them the brooms. Yoong was still not impressed - no music, no singing. Was this some kind of comedy replacement which we couldn't understand? As the man moved away with his wheelbarrow, another man playing a piano-accordion came along and we noticed that people were following him around a corner and into an enclosed yard between some buildings. By the time we got in, we found that the show had already started and there were no more seats so we sat on the ground, along with a lot of others, and listened to two young children, a boy and a girl, singing beautifully as they carried out household tasks on a small stage. It wasn't long before I realised that this was a performance of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel. Some of the singing was in German as well as French. The children were joined by the mother and eventually the father, who was the broom-seller we saw earlier. Towards the end of the first act, the children ran away through the audience, followed soon after by the musicians carrying their bulky instruments. We had to quickly make way for them.
We then followed the accordionist for several blocks until we reached a local park, all lit up as a very romantic woodland setting for the second act. Weird sounds came from various corners of the park and mysterious figures approached out of the shadows, as the children continued to perform with great professionalism.
Another long march through the streets took us to the courtyard of a building which we later found out was an artists' colony. Here, at last, we were in time to get comfortable seats and could enjoy to the full this magnificent performance.
After the show we were once again led to the streets by the accordionist, but ended up back at the same place, where food was laid out on tables. Gingerbread featured very prominently, of course, but there were a lot of dips and other good things to sample.
Judging from these two events, the Op?ra des Rues was not only a clever idea, but brilliantly executed - another of the many reasons to love Paris.