Come visit the Gaîté Lyrique, its backstage and its history! Place of music and future alternatives, it has evolved well since the time of the operettas of Offenbach, without forgetting a passage through the amusement park Planète Magique.
La Gaîté Lyrique is a contemporary artistic place with a rich and incredible history. Let yourself be guided to discover the mysterious and atypical history of the building and the various multidisciplinary spaces that make it up.
On the occasion of the European Heritage Days, this behind-the-scenes tour is a walk in the building that presents the different programming spaces (sometimes not open to the public), the artistic project and the adventures of its history.
Few other Parisian places can boast of such a tumultuous history: recording among the strongest recipes of all Parisian places during the Paris Commune, celebrating the seventieth anniversary of Victor Hugo, home of Russian ballets passing through Paris in the 1920s... The theatre of Gaite was looted during the Occupation. In the 1970s, we even saw a circus school that had set up stables for its elephants in the attic! At the beginning of the 1980s, when the masterly dome of the hall threatened to collapse, it was decided to concretize part of the large hall. It was soon destroyed by the amusement park in the middle of Paris «Planète Magique», which opened for a few weeks in 1989. Since then, the Gaîté Lyrique was dormant, the dust gradually covering this central place of Parisian cultural life. The situation continued until in 2002, the City of Paris decided to establish a new cultural establishment there for digital cultures and contemporary music. The project, while being innovative, respects the historic parts of the building and aims to propose a building whose equipment constitutes a real “toolbox” for artists who wish to invest it. Now dedicated to digital cultures, the Gaîté lyrique explores transversally all fields of creation and new media, fostering privileged connections between them. Thus, it focuses on the intersection of disciplines through music, graphic design, video games, cinema, through theatre, dance, fashion, design, architecture..., and offers events and activities to the extent of the digital revolution that is taking place and its anchorage in society.