Flirtatious Intermezzo

I had been told about a conference at the contemporary art museum in Brussels that spiked my interest and decided to pro-actively remember the date and time of the event and actually go. The lecture was held by a New York curator and examined the relationship between the renaissance approach of ‘intermezzo’ in the theatre and contemporary art. The conference was remarkable; I had a little Calarts nostalgia while listening to this precise yet chaotic geyser of information, the educational yet challenging language. The New York accent added to the general sense of: 'I might just get on a plane to JFK, go straight to Brooklyn and order myself a dirty martini, real dirty please’.
Anyway, point is, the lecture was amazing and following my fantastical ways, as time and words went by, I started finding this curator more and more good looking, and charming and wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a little something with an art theorist of this calibre… At the end of the lecture, he opened up to the expected Q&A and I couldn’t help but ask meticulous questions and play the devil’s advocate to test the guy. Disconcerted at first, he eventually started playing the game a little which satisfied me entirely. At the end of the event, I walked up to him to ask him the name of an unknown yet incredibly cutting edge piece at the time by artist Picabia. He admitted having forgotten the name but wrote down his email address for me to contact him, it would come back to him eventually. He then proceeded to get up and introduce himself to me. The unfortunate circumstance of this first physical connection resided in the fact that the man was over a foot smaller than me.

Not so Desperate Living

The other weekend, I went to Paris to reunite with some childhood friends: Elinor and Alice. Elinor came all the way from Israel to tell us all about her newborn child. It also appears her husband bullied her to get a plane ticket to Europe when he found her sobbing one evening after having obsessively reorganized every single cupboard and drawer in her house. Smart man. Nonetheless, she needed air and always finds her inspiration in Paris.
We spent a short but wonderful 24 hrs, chatting like schoolgirls, which I suppose we are to a certain extent.That Sunday evening, Elinor’s sister, Tal, a sound designer who has recently ‘moved in’ with the company (Zingaro) she has been working with for the past six months, invited us to a ‘Spring Party’. Both Alice and I gathered along in an attempt to spend as much time as humanly possible with our Israeli cupcake.
Zingaro turned out to be one of the most improbable microcosm in the middle of a dodgy and plainly said ugly part of Paris: a little green haven surrounded by a large amount of dreadful social projects. Zingaro is a circus company that works solely with horses and secondarily a large team of riders, trainers, acrobats and grooms. All of these people live on the land in colourful trailers. When first told about Tal’s new living arrangements, I couldn’t help but think about John Waters ‘Desperate Living’ but I was very much impressed by the site. Clearly, a tour of a trailer stays somewhat of an anticlimactic experience especially when you are taller than 5ft, but there was a certain quaintness and happy eccentricity about it all that made it delightful. And this, even after a trip to the toilet where one is asked to pour a cup of sawdust over whatever one has produced.

Tal took us around the stables; I was stunned at how impeccable they were, we saw horses of all sizes and types. Larger stables for the Argentinean horses that need to stick together as a herd and share one huge open hangar all to themselves. We also visited the horses ‘gym’ and shower. We got to pet them and take pictures while friendly dogs and the neighbour’s children came along. Eventually we arrived at the ‘Spring Party’ lit by hundreds of coloured lampions. Everyone had brought some food and beers were cooling in trashcans filled with water and ice. Music was playing and kids had started invading the dance floor. A Jack Russell kept nagging a particularly patient Dalmatian. The air was sweet and hot, roses climbing up an old caravan and a huge cherry tree looming over us: Alice, Elinor and I kept silent for a while. Sharp looking acrobats passing by, kids screaming with joy, a solid looking chap cutting saucisson on a table nearby: one couldn’t help but feel in awe.

My enthusiasm sort of faded when I got stuck in conversation with some guy who didn’t seem to sense the same contradiction I did when he explained to me that he was an unemployed social worker and had been for the past 3 years, and didn’t seem to have any issues with it per se. The exchange became the most exasperating when he described to me why social workers in France weren’t doing their job correctly while simultaneously failing to actually explain his own, surely revolutionary, techniques. A little later Tal’s companion tried to convince me that rulers and flat angle brackets were useless tools for carpentry. I suddenly felt awfully tired and we eventually left but all in all, I was happily surprised by the experience.