To celebrate both the reopening and the Heritage Days, and to offer the general public a different way of discovering the place, the Théâtre de Chaillot is offering a festive and artistic weekend, “Chaillot Experience”, with free shows - acrobats, musicians, dancers - indoors and outdoors.
Highlights of the festivities, the great crossings of Nathan Paulin who will walk on a strap stretched between the Eiffel Tower and the Chaillot theater.
Working for years with Rachid Ouramdane, the director of the national stage dedicated to dance - notably in his show "Corps Extrêmes" which will replay at the end of the season - Nathan will make the crossing twice this weekend: Saturday at 4:15 pm and Sunday at 3 p.m.
On the ground, acrobats will accompany him.
He will be able to interact with them, sit on his strap, get up.
Broadcast during the half-hour that his crossing should last, a recorded soundtrack will allow us to discover what he is thinking, up there, to evolve on a thread of life only 2.5 cm thick over a distance of 670 m.
A crossing already made in 2017
What else? "A lot of things," says the "highliner", as they say, that we meet on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower from which he will set off. I'm in a hypersensitive mode when I'm on a wire, I feel a lot. On the first steps, on what I have to do, get up, move forward, I obviously feel a little stress. But then I can let myself go in a state of flow
(a state of maximum concentration)
, very concentrated, then others where I need to go and tap into positive thoughts because it's complicated ”, continues- he.
He has already made this crossing on December 9, 2017 for the Telethon. For the Telethon, again, in 2019 he had connected two towers of La Défense at 150 m in height. “I have already done it, but it will necessarily be different, he believes. The conditions were terrible, there was 70 km / h wind, it had rained, it was cold, he recalls. There, I think that I will benefit much more from it ”. A problem the wind? "Not if there isn't too much, you even need a little, it stabilizes the line, it prevents the ripples that my movements create from coming back to me".
This line, similar to tie-down straps, must be installed overnight from Friday to Saturday.
“Between 3 am and 4:30 am,” says the tightrope walker.
We tie it to the Eiffel Tower and pull it to the theater, we have to cut the road for that, then we hold it out ”.
It is in two parts, connected by a kind of carabiner.
"There is no danger, assures Nathan, the strap is doubled for safety reasons, everything is well done".
It is assured thanks to a harness, obviously.
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What it is hard to believe when seeing this 1.97 m boy who made a profession of this funny activity of walking on a very long or very long thread, is that he was afraid of heights. "Yeah, and it wasn't easy at first," he smiles. Besides, the first time I walked above the void, I didn't like it at all, he recalls. Then I made it low to the ground, I gained confidence and took a liking to it ”.
To the point of fetching world records for length, 600, 1000 then 1662 m… Today, the world record is at 2100 m. He is not the one who holds it and going to take it back does not necessarily interest him. Except to do it in a specific place. He dreams of walking between the Eiffel towers and Montparnasse. "It's very complicated, already to obtain the authorization, but technically it is feasible", he confides, looking at the black monolith of Montparnasse. "There are 2.7 km."
