Mast, flying bridge, ropes, so many words inherited from the world of the navy, and found behind the scenes of illusion. Since its origins, the theatre has relied on a technical apparatus that has always been constitutive: we have found, in the theatre of Megalopolis in the Peloponnese, the remains of a device of rails allowing the changes of scenery, dated to the 4th century BC. Since then, a great history of techniques has been written, with the improvement of the devices, the invention of the hatches, all the ingenuity of the cogs and winches, steel cables, tubular frames, hoists, acoustic conches… It is in this noble filiation that your company is inscribed.
Indeed, you are the head of the largest French theatre company, and you dress and equip theatres around the world with state-of-the-art machinery. The devil, the cub, the nomad, or the sedentary, all these deposited models that you created, maneuver the reverse of the scene. It is a great pleasure for me to pay tribute to the essential work of a family business serving directors, producers, stage designers and all theatre professionals.
AMG-Féchoz has become, under your common impulse, an institution of reference in the field of theatrical production.
Dear Micheline Gautier,
It all started in Paris with your father’s small business, boulevard de la Chapelle, «Mécanique, serrurerie, électricité», then rue Ernestine. It was in the mid-1950s that you joined your father in his activity - that father who took you with him to the Théâtre Musical-hall ABC to attend behind the scenes the shows he was maintaining.
Dear Pierre Gautier,
“You’re doing a funny thing!”: these are the words of your father-in-law Alexandre Féchoz, when you decide to leave the world of the SCNF, where you are an engineer, to join his company.
You integrate the world of machinery and equipment as technical and commercial director, as consulting engineer too.
The family business is then taking the turn of the scenographic technique, through the cinema: moving screens, conversion of theatres into theatres are then part of your daily life. Sometimes you have to go the other way by converting the famous hall of the Empire into a modern theatre, which you transformed in your early years into a «Cinérama».
In 1988, after the paternal company was bought by Spie-Batignolles, you created, dear Micheline Gautier, your own company, AMG Féchoz. Complementary in your skills, accomplices in your aspirations, you bring to you two achievements that earned you in 1992 the silver medal of the academy of architecture in the category entrepreneur.
We owe to your company of stage machinery and stage equipment - the first in France, and the third in Europe - major developments in the field, through projects that have redesigned, equipped, in more than forty countries, prestigious stages and halls. I am thinking of the Opéra Bastille, the Palais de Chaillot, the Palais des Congrès, the Olympia, the Théâtre de la Ville, the Théâtre de la Colline, the Maison de la culture du Japon in Paris, or even, in this district dear to your heart, the Théâtre des Abbesses – if notfor Paris, without forgetting the Lille opera, the National Theatre of Strasbourg, the Tjibaou cultural centre in Nouméa... And abroad, the Marrakech Congress Centre, the Brazzaville Cultural Centre, the UN Auditorium in Geneva, the Hanoi Opera - I cannot mention them all, as the list is as long as it is prestigious. Added to this is the fact that you took part in equipping 85% of French complexes and cinemas.
For more than fifty years, with a respect for the built heritage and a taste for technical prowess, you have contributed to the excellence of the most prestigious cultural facilities, in collaboration with renowned scenographers and architects; for example, recently, with Jean Nouvel for the construction of the Philharmonie de Paris – a major project for which you know my attachment. With talent and passion, you have played a major role in the technological evolution of the theatrical machinery in recent decades, to the benefit of a creativity to which you have brought, behind the curtain, your claw.
Dear Micheline and Pierre Gautier, on behalf of the French Republic, we make you Knights of the Order of Arts and Letters.