A giant, mechanical horse-dragon doing battle with its arachnid counterpart through downtown Ottawa was arguably one of the most popular events in 2017.
La Machine brought hundreds of thousands of people to the downtown core for the weekend it was in town. It was so busy that ByWard Market restaurants ran out of food.
But can the proverbial lightning strike twice? The man who brought the monsters here the first time seems to think so, and so do the machines’ creators.
Retiring Ottawa 2017 Executive Director Guy LaFlamme tells CFRA’s Ottawa Now with Evan Solomon he and a few others traveled to France recently to talk about the return of La Machine.
“We were invited to go back to Nantes thanks to efforts made by the Embassy of France,” he says. “So, I was there last week with a representative from Mayor Watson’s office and someone from Ottawa Tourism and, basically, it was for me to pass along all the contacts to Ottawa Tourism and the City for them to pursue the discussions of bringing back La Machine.”
LaFlamme says it’s not a done deal, but there’s a lot of interest on both sides of the Atlantic to have the mechanical beasts return to the Capital.
“People from La Machine will also be delighted to be back.”
But, he says, we probably won’t see Kumo and Long-Ma again.
“La Machine’s artistic director would definitely prefer to bring different characters,” he says. “To keep the magic, to keep the novelty effect, they would need to come up with some kind of totally new concept.”
LaFlamme says new machines are being developed and will be unveiled in France later this year. He adds the City is also looking at the idea of sharing the cost of bringing La Machine to North America with another major city, which will also get its turn with the machines.
“There was lots of interest from major cities on the west coast and in the southwestern U.S.,” LaFlamme says.
LaFlamme says it will take “a number of years” to secure the financing and work out the logistics, but he says it’s a step the City is very keen on taking.
“Mayor Watson was clear; he wanted to make sure this was not just a flash in the pan in 2017. He wanted to make sure that as many events could be sustained, moving forward. That’s what the City and Ottawa Tourism are doing right now.”