The well-known Düsseldorf carriage builder Jacques Tilly builds a huge cat of prey for the WZ foot group in the Shrove Monday procession. The WZ looked over his shoulder. Jacques Tilly (41) and his colleague Doris George (29) have been booming since Christmas . Actually, the two are sculptors, but their great passion is the construction of carnival floats. On behalf of the Krefeld WZ, Tilly’s team is currently busy tinkering with a tiger in the Düsseldorf wagon construction hall.
Finally, the editors took over the sponsorship of the Sumatran tigers Sutera and Beludru and their children Ratu and Raja in the Krefeld Zoo. And at the Shrove Monday parade, the WZ will pull along with a Tiger foot group. Almost 100 WZ readers of all ages have registered for the lively group – everyone can join in. The giant tiger becomes the identification mark. To make the carnival tiger as original as possible, Jacques Tilly first got hold of pictures of the big cats and drew a colored, true-to-scale sketch – the template to be used for the work. Once this is done, the wire mesh body is bent into shape until everything is in place. “The wiring takes the longest,” Tilly knows, “that’s because of the many layers of muscle.” Doris George also has the necessary instinct for this. When she first introduced herself to Tilly – out of interest in carnival float construction – he initially asked himself: “What does she want here, she can do everything,” he reveals with a smile. She acquired the skills in Phantasialand, where she built sets. “It’s just fascinating. You have more freedom in the design and you can follow the construction of a car from start to finish,” says the freelance sculptor. The work never gets boring, after all, other jobs come in outside of the session – backdrops for film sets and discotheques or exhibition stands.
The work for the revelers begins in the summer. And by Christmas at the latest, it’s really itchy, says Tilly: “From then on there’s a lot of time pressure and we often work from early in the morning until after midnight.” With his team – consisting of five people – Jacques Tilly manages up to 20 cars per session. In total, he estimates that he built more than 100 carnival floats in the twenty years of his career. The tiger alone took a good week and a half. He doesn’t know how many hours of work went into it, he didn’t count them.
Now the king of the jungle is almost ready. A few splashes of color are missing here and there. They are now applied with a brush and airbrush technique. “A mix is always best,” explains Tilly. And when the ground is also green, the tiger can be handed over to its intended purpose. He then adorns the safari jeep with which the Krefeld WZ editorial team brings their camels to the people at the Shrove Monday procession on February 7th. Well then, a vigorously shouted “Krefelder Helau”.