Toulouse is boiling. Since Thursday and until Sunday evening, the crowd mass Capitole square and the adjoining streets for a glimpse of the Minotaur, an animal, mechanical, designed completely by The Machine, the company’s world famous street show based in Nantes, to the pink city. Fully funded by the metropolis, it will install to home, from the 9 November to the Halle of the Machine, where it can carry up to 50 passengers on its back, to the image of the Great elephant of the company in Nantes.

Friday, the second day of the epic “the keeper of The temple”, Ariane the giant spider has made an entry stunning on the Capitol square in a flurry of smoke and a symphony of violins and percussion.

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and Then, in front of an audience moved and excited, tight on the Capitol square and in the surrounding streets, the beast half-man, half-bull begins his wanderings as expected in the “maze” in toulouse. From a “waking dream” of François Delarozière, artistic director of The Machine, the colossus of wood of the linden arches, bends, rears up, brushing the crowd in a fairyland of artificial snow, accompanied by an orchestra perched on platforms in the shape of aeroplanes, no doubt in tribute to the aviation history of Toulouse.

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“there’s creativity, but also all that is embodied in the geography of a city,” commented mayor LR of Toulouse Jean-Luc Moudenc, during a press conference, “The Machine invites the public to reclaim the city”. Despite the “cold sweats” in terms of security, the mayor “has always defended the idea that it was not necessary to deprive the inhabitants of Toulouse in these times” of cultural creation. “I believe this will create an element of identity for our city, an element of attractiveness vis-à-vis the outside world. And today the culture is a lever of economic attractiveness, I am convinced”, he stressed.

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