A really long presentation
Try to imagine going to the drive-in movies, without a car, where there are six or seven screens in a row, all showing the one movie. Or how about someone starting a row of music boxes, where the music has to be in chorus. Or maybe we’ll just let the technicians worry about the whole aspect of how it works, and just enjoy a really big show.
Tonight, with a deadline sharply outlined for us, we packed up the home team (including the dog) and headed down to Espace 400, a mythical zone in the city where (we have heard) a huge celebration has been underway all summer. Live performances, a garden, boats at the pier, plants in boxes. And a really remarkable presentation, night after night, entitled Le Moulin À Images. A masterpiece by Robert Lepage.
This is a multimedia presentation; sound and lights. Where we stood, the sound was excellent, and except for the people with umbrellas that practiced their opening (synchronized with a micro rainshower) the visibility was very good. To light up a whole row of grain silos, there are just under three hundred video projectors that have been harnessed, along with an assortment of other fixed lights and a steam generation unit (whales and trains).
At certain moments, we could imagine that we were watching a Pink Floyd concert, the river, standing in church or waiting for the modem to synchronize (I swear, I recongnized every one of the speeds presented, but that’s just residue from an earlier lifetime of slow BBS and dialup). The show never dragged, and i’m almost tempted to return for a reprise tomorrow. Except that I can’t face the kind of crowd that the closing night will generate: numerous and nostalgic. I’ll save that atmosphere for more important things.
We were warned not to miss the show, and we didn’t. I’m glad.
