The Festival du Merveilleux takes place every winter at the Musée des Arts Forains in Bercy, one of the most unusual venues in Paris. The museum houses an extraordinary collection of antique fairground attractions, mechanical curiosities, and theatrical objects from the 19th and early 20th centuries. During the festival, these objects come back to life.
The closing show of the festival, performed by the company Demain On Change Tout, begins inside the museum and moves through the streets of the Bercy neighborhood. The performers include giant mechanical puppets that dwarf the people controlling them, musicians, and theatrical characters that exist somewhere between circus, theatre, and something older and harder to name.
Watching this parade move through the streets of Bercy at night is one of the more genuinely strange and beautiful experiences available in Paris. The puppets are large enough that they change the scale of the street they move through. People watching from apartment windows above the route call down to the performers. Children in the crowd react in a way that pure spectacle occasionally produces in young faces.
The festival runs for twelve days and the closing show represents the accumulated energy of those days compressed into a final performance. The performers know the parade route by this point and the confidence that comes from repetition gives the closing night a precision that earlier performances might not have.
The Festival du Merveilleux is not on most Paris itineraries and that is its advantage. If you are in Paris in winter and want to experience something that has no equivalent anywhere else in the city, find out when the closing parade takes place and go to Bercy for it.
