Le Musee des Arts Forains

Yesterday I had the extreme good fortune of visiting Paris' Museum of Fairground Art along with the cast of La Clique. Located at Les Pavillions de Bercy, this spectacular museum is only available to groups who request a guided tour. Being a wily band of circus folk, we also had the honour of meeting the man who started the collection, Jean-Paul Favand, and were even permitted to peruse the warehouses!

The collection is huge and beautifully presented. The space also doubles as a rental hall. But the best part is that they actually let you play some of the games and ride the rides! I was pretty skeptical of this one old timey ride where you pedal a bike (I'm told it was a thrill to try a bike way back in the day) and your pedaling powers the ride. But it turns out the damn thing goes hella fast and the tour guide constantly had to pull a brake to prevent the thing from picking up too much speed and throwing us off!

Les Garcons de Cafe, best game ever.

Carousel!

After the rides, the most wonderful part would definitely be the warehouses. As I mentioned, they aren't normally part of the tour. One room housed all the carousel characters awaiting restoration. Then there were these creepy wax models of messed up anatomy. To give you an idea, the double penis/triple scrotum was the least disturbing specimen...

At night,

they come to life...

And that, my friend,

is when they come for your soul!

Lastly, we visited a room housing the museum's most recently acquired collection. It consists of over 2000 individual objects! They are they sets, puppets and original mask molds belonging to a family run company that operated for over 200 years! The room was made up almost entirely of heads. All kinds of heads of every imaginable character all for the purpose of making rubber masks. They had everything from fictional characters to politicians, pop culture icons to mutilated zombies. It was brilliant. They even had the heads of two former Canadian Prime Ministers! I was quite surprised.

Chretien and Mulroney

Don't run with scissors.

Oh, and you may be familiar with the fellow who appears at the 1 minute 50 second mark of the following video. His remains could be found at the museum as well!

All in all, we were there for three hours. The history and artistry is absolutely magnificent. When carnivals were at their peak, part of the draw was their splendor. Looking at today's carnival rides, you would never imagine that only 100 years ago, carousel horses were hand carved with real horse hair tails*! Not to mention the gold leaf and inlaid mirrors. Here are a few more pictures because really, you don't read a museum, you see it.







* Only the German made horses used real horse hair for tails. Otherwise, they were made of wood.