the Champ-de-Mars puppeteer will finally be able to return to his theater after the Olympic and Paralympic Games

The artist must temporarily leave the Guignol theater due to the construction of a temporary stadium for beach volleyball events.

He entrusts his “relief” after a favorable decision: the manager of the Guignol theater on Champ-de-Mars, a neighborhood figure, ordered to leave because of the ephemeral stadium built at the foot of the Eiffel Tower for the Olympic Games, can stay two more months in his theater and will find him again in the fall. Julien Sommer, to whom the Paris town hall had announced at the beginning of January the termination of his concession on March 31, will finally be able to continue performing his children’s shows until the end of May, he declared on Tuesday March 19 at the AFP.

Above all, “it’s a suspension and no longer a termination, so I can come back in October”two months before the end of his six-year contract, at the end of November, he said. “The puppet theater will be able to return to its location at the end of the Games”confirmed to AFP trade assistant Nicolas Bonnet-Oulaldj.

Compensation during the tests

During the four months of closure, Julien Sommer, 38, who has worked since he was 15 in this tiny theater founded at the beginning of the 20th century, “may be compensated”, according to the town hall, which guarantees him to be able to leave his equipment on site. Termination of the contract “was scaring” to the puppeteer, who feared being permanently “fired”.

Even if a new call for competition must take place for the future contract, there is “fairly little doubt” that he cannot obtain it again, reassures the town hall. The forced departure of the artist, justified by the ongoing construction of an ephemeral stadium for beach volleyball events, had moved beyond the neighborhood.