Can Giant French Dog Puppets Make Your Year?
It was 12:30 pm on a Friday in August of 2023. I was in Sint Paulusplaats, Antwerp, standing on a park bench. I had arrived from Brussels to Antwerp the night before and scoured the Internet, trying to figure out where I would find the thing I had come to Antwerp for, with little luck. They’re cagey. They don’t like to be too explicit about their location or what you’ll see once there. Figuring it out is part of the fun.
That morning, I had found a post on a Facebook account devoted to summer events in Antwerp, written in Dutch, but, armed with Google Translate, it was enough for me to go on: Sint Paulusplaats, around noon. So here I was, in Sint Paulusplaats, an open, expansive square, waiting, and hoping. When I had first arrived, there had been almost no one else there. But there were fences, set up around the perimeter of the square, and more police than you’d expect for a random Friday afternoon, giving the place a distinctive air of something unusual about to happen.
As the minutes ticked on, a crowd slowly began to gather. People wandered in from nearby restaurants, adults and children alike, in groups and solo, hanging out in the sun, staking out spots, waiting. I started to feel more sure that I was in the right place. I wished I had brought an umbrella to ward off the hot sun. Noon had not meant noon to these folk… but who knew where they were? What was going on in some other part of the city?
Just as the boy next to me (he looked about 9) started to become impossibly impatient (and let’s be real, I was getting there, too), an undulating wave of people began pouring into the space in the plaza along the fences. They came from the corner to the southwest, in advance of and surrounding the thing I came to see, and then…
There he was. Rolling into the park, tongue lolling, preceded by three people in red velvet, gold-braided long coats and short pants, surrounded by dozens more on either side of him…
The Bull Machin.
The Bull Machin towers over the crowd at 14.4 feet tall; it takes 29 puppeteers to power him along the street, tail wagging and tongue lolling, and even sometimes (as the crowd just to my right soon found out) spraying drool. He’s a giant bull dog, a creation of the French street theatre company Royal de Luxe.
I had seen a video of a performance of their Deep Sea Diver and Little Girl puppets years prior and determinedly, but also a little hopelessly, put it on my list of Heartbeat Experiences. I wanted to see them so much, but it felt like a logistical pipe dream — they mostly perform in Europe, in smaller cities, on an irregular schedule that’s hard to catch with enough advance notice for an American to plan a trip. They’d been in Liverpool and in Leuven, but their dates always seemed to conflict with something else in my life.
And then they posted on Facebook in May of 2023 that they’d be in Antwerp in August, and I saw it. I already had a different trip planned in September, and it was only a few months away, but this was important. This was the kind of unforgettable experience that I had to commit to.
My boss at the time wasn’t super happy with me, but this mattered more. In 10 years I will barely remember that boss, but I will never forget standing on that park bench, listening to the delighted excitement of the crowd around me, feeling the expansive weight of joy spreading in my chest, as the Bull Machin fluttered his huge eyelashes at me and tromped by, his magnificent mechanical legs relentlessly pulled by his puppeteers.
I spent the rest of that weekend traipsing around Antwerp trying to figure out where the Bull Machin and his buddy Xolo, a Mexican hairless dog, would be. On Sunday, the performance culminated in a series of heats and then a final big race between the two dogs around the oval of roads around the Zuidpark in southern Antwerp.
Spoiler alert: Xolo’s a lot faster than the Bull Machin. It was a delight watching him fly around the park compared with the Bull Machin’s slower, more plodding gait, even as the bulldog did his best to compete in the race. As Royal De Luxe’s site says of the two dogs, “One is as fragile as a packet of spaghetti, the other is denser and clumsier than hundreds of anvils on a small plate.”
All of the words of the performance were in French. It didn’t matter.
Most of the words of the crowd around me were in Dutch. That, too, didn’t matter.
We were all speaking the same emotional language — delight in awe. These massive dog puppets, operated by their quiet, hard-working, unsmiling crews had enchanted all of us. We watched with held breath, unexpected laughter, and surprised yells, cheering the canine racers on. And we turned our heads to each other, locked eyes, and smiled, sharing in wordless joy at this marvelous spectacle we were blessed to witness.
As of my writing of this piece, Royal de Luxe are not touring with the giants, dogs or otherwise. Still, follow them here: https://www.facebook.com/CompagnieRoyaldeLuxe so that you can have a hope of finding out when they take these magnificent beasts out on the road again, and if you’re lucky enough to catch the post that tells you when and where, book your trip, and then share it with me.