__Don Quichotte

Production : 1997
Fixed show
Show length : 1 hour
Audience capacity : 2 000 personnes

An adaptation of the famous book by Miguel de Cervantes published in 1605 !

The show is played in a fixed area for a large capacity crowd (2000 people). There is no need for a stage, as the story unfolds amongst the public from several points in the show area. The audience is invited to follow the action from spot to spot in order to keep up with the aerial adventures of our hero. From the ‘village fete’ atmosphere to the deepest tragedy, all shared moments are truly poetic. Actors, ‘inflatables’ and firework technicians with the participation of the public make of this show, a truly pleasurable experience.

The Story

Once upon a time, a proud but clumsy knight, a noble spirit brimming with tales of wonderful chivalry, dreams of going from battle to battle to save the world.

Thus our ‘hero’, this eternal lover of an inaccessible planet and knight of the worthy cause, puts on an ill fitting suit of armour and escapes astride the clouds, which hang from his illusions.

Jumping over obstacles, affronting the worst of foes, going from the ridiculous to the most dramatic, Don Quichotte recreates the world unto his fashion.

Just when he is about to accomplish his quest and meet his “loved’ one, he must face an ultimate challenge, the terrifying and all too real ‘Knight of mirrors’…Will “reason” be stronger than “folly” ?

Translated extract from an interview with Marc Mirales and Marc Bureau for the Cervantes International Festival in Guanajuato in Mexico 2003 :

“Cervantes romance is the archetype of a universal story, having been over time, told throughout the world; it speaks to all. It certainly is the first great ‘popular’ romance.
The character Don Quichotte touches us by his tragic and comic dimension. What seems like folly is but a call for tolerance via a dream. Sometimes we hear people say: “Me, I don’t fight wind mills!” Well maybe more often, we ought to fight windmills, as the reality in which we live, is constructed by ourselves, invented by us.
The bearded man, vows to help the small, the oppressed, he swears to kill the giants, to defeat arrogance, to kill envy by the generosity of courage.
The ‘giants’ still exist and continue to grind the ‘imaginary’ to powder.
Don Quichotte just allows us to assert the need to dream, to romanticize, to adhere to a certain form of utopia.”

We don’t have the pretension to portray all the facets evoked by this famous character, that would be an impossible mission; but we portray specific episodes such as the windmills, the sheep, the triumphal arrival in Barcelona and the wonderful real-imaginary voyage to the stars. We would not want the public to go away from the show saying ‘I now know Don Quichotte’ but rather ‘I’m now going to take a closer look’. Read the book !

This production isn’t really that large, the cast in total is just fourteen people, it’s the images that are big! Little by little, as the show unfolds, our Don Quichotte takes off towards the stars, carried by his ‘library’, (an inflatable sphere that tears itself from the ground). This was our starting point.
Nearly all the other elements are ‘inflatables’, the Noah’s arch, the stars and the knight of mirrors, (a kind of flying ‘bullet proof’ chariot).
The pyrotechnics in this show equally play an important part. The spectators should be prepared especially to move with the action, to be at the heart of the action, they should be ready to have Don Quichotte ‘walk’ on there heads, to have things spring out from behind them whilst they where expecting to see them appear from in front, to be so close to the structures that they can actually touch them.

Back to Biography l The company