A New Westminster man has been wowing Calgary Stampede-goers all weeklong with his eagle – but it’s not the white-headed, yellow-billed bird of prey you may be thinking of.
Peter Boulanger helped kick off the Calgary Stampede festival on July 3 by flying his sixty-foot wide, 550-pound aluminum eagle during a six-minute evening performance.
“It’s about 50 feet in the air when it starts going over the Queen Mary stage,” he told the Record during a phone interview from Cow Town. “The lighting is just absolutely beautiful. There’s kind of an ‘oooooohh’ from the audience as soon as they can see it.”
The eagle is Boulanger’s second large scale marionette (the first being David, commissioned for the opening of the Vancouver Trade and Convention Centre in 2010). The project began a few years ago when he got a call from Stampede organizers to create something for their 2012 event.
“The only direction I was given was, ‘We’d like a giant eagle.’ They didn’t mention how big,” Boulanger recalled.
The bird was originally designed to be 90 feet wide, but it was soon realized that would’ve been way too big. After settling for 30 feet less, Boulanger started to build, spending 14 hours a day working in his shop.
“It was just nuts,” he said, adding it was a much more demanding structure than David. “In the wings, there’s 250 places where wings cross each other and have to be welded together, and each of those spots has to be welded from four sides, so roughly 1,000 welds on each wing.”
The structure (the largest of its kind in the world) is flown on wires, with Boulanger steering the wings – “the most difficult and dangerous part” – and another puppeteer moving the head. The eyes even light up.
At the 2012 Calgary Stampede, the eagle was accompanied by a performer on a separate harness, who “rode” on its shoulders. This year, a dream catcher-like structure was built so that a performer could make it look as though he was being held in the eagle’s claws.
Asked what his next big project might be, Boulanger wouldn’t give too much away.
“I want to build a killer whale,” he said. “I think it has a pretty strong connection to the West Coast of Canada.”
The Calgary Stampede wraps up on July 12. Boulanger will be performing every night until then.
The local resident and his wife, Ninon Parent, are Cirque du Soleil alumni, and are the owners of The Underground Circus, a circus group based in Vancouver.
