Artist-inventor

Franz Clochard

Classically trained musician and mechanical whizz, Franz Clochard nurtured an inquiring mind and pioneering spirit. His research and development of show-stopping contraptions and performances drew him to the circus where he discovered a world bounded only by the limits of his imagination.
From piano-playing chickens to acrobatic stunts accompanied by his violin, Franz Clochard traipsed around France from village to village until he came across the ‘Cirque Bidon’ in the south, in 1985. This meeting gave rise to the circus Archaos.
From its humble beginnings, where the headlining act was a bunch of chickens, mechanics and motorbikes soon took over and it was an overnight sensation. Not content to sit back on his famous ascending motorbike and chainsaw, Franz invited jazz musicians and sporting champions into his sensational, metal, ultra-violet universe. The public loved it! At a time when traditional circus was in the doldrums, Archaos arrived like a breath of foul air! ‘The Incredible Chainsaw Circus’, as the British press called it, played to great acclaim in London and Paris in 1988, and then went on a World Tour. Alternative circus was born.

Constantly looking to innovate and create, he founded Mécanique Vivante (lively mechanics) in 1989 to apply his prodigious energy to his two loves: music and mechanics. The company couldn’t be better named: musichanical hybrids, state-of-the-art technology and robotics, staged in the most surprising and spectacular settings, from an operahouse to a hillside!