To Take Down the Moon

The French word for “show” is “le spectacle” and, well, what I saw on Saturday night the 26th of September was certainly a spectacle!

Décrocher la Lune only happens once every three years (it was every two, but, it’s damn expensive). This was one of those times when I was thinking, “I may very well be the only American at this thing!” There was going to be, I was told, between 10,000 and 20,000 people at this show. EC, her mom, dad, and a friend of the family and myself all squeezed onto the Grand Place of La Louvière (a name derived from “wolf”). There was a huge stage with what looked like organ pipes, the town in the center had a moon on it, and there was a huge crane about, too. The fire department was there, TV crews, and everything! I thought I was going to see a local dance performance, not a huge community event!

I soon discovered why the fire department was poised with water cannons and why the stage was full of pipe organs….a man in white began to light them like candles and, then, a few huge plumes of fire. This was going to be interesting, I thought.

The performance began and, sadly, I don’t have pictures – I was too mesmerized – but it was awesome. At one point a dancer danced up the façade of the tower with the moon on it, dancers suspended from the crane danced in the air, children let balloons go, there were a lot of drums (Carnival-type drums), and lots and lots of fire. At one point, music was played on the pipes on the main stage with fire. Not sure how that worked, but it was pretty cool.

Puppetry is a big thing in Belgium, (here is a museum in Brussels, just like at UConn!) and a number of puppets were dancing around, too. There was a story to go along with all this and a very energetic emcee was telling the story, but unlike in the church tour (see post above) I couldn’t follow all that well.

In the end, one of the puppets, Sancho I think was his name, literally climbed the tower and took down the moon. (Well, turned it off….) Not for long, though, because we need the moon and soon it was lighted again and then….fireworks, lots of them.

The show ended, of course, with a Michael Jackson impersonator performing Billie Jean. It was then back to the family friend’s house for a beer (I had Chimay, a good, strong trappist brew) and then back to the C’s house. I crashed in one of the spare rooms and never slept so soundly.

It was back to Brussels in the morning and a harried car ride to catch the right train, during which I found out that French drivers may very well be the Belgian equivalent of Jersey drivers or drivers from Florida. (Even with the bad driving of the car in front of us, I made the train)

I had a fantastic time and the hospitality of the C’s was just wonderful. As Mrs. C said, it’s nice to see something that you would know to look for unless you were a local and this was certainly something like that. This reminded me of my time in Orvieto in Italy when a friend and I stumbled upon a spectacle on a plaza there, with performers on stilts carrying flaming swords and reenacting an ancient myth of some sort. Just good times