dad and the dead queen

Dad and I are curled up watching an episode of the West Wing, so this will be short.  He arrived Tuesday afternoon, bearing all my winter clothes and jet glue, a most welcome sight.  Since then our days have been mostly full of the theatre, with shows of La Reine Morte every night and rehearsals every day.  Even with the many hours I had to be sitting around backstage, we've managed to fit in lots of lovely breakfasts and little walks around Toulouse that usually end up with a glass of wine somewhere or some quite excellent French food.

A Wine Bouffon with a Ballet Bouffon :)

The shows all went smoothly, minus the fact that during class Saturday morning (our one day with two shows), the first cast principal woman injured her ankle, just badly enough that the entire second cast ended up having to perform both shows.  The principal couple in this ballet had I think seven different pas de deux (as opposed to normally one or three in most ballets), so we were all a little in awe that they were still standing at the end of the second run -- luckily, the first cast woman was healthy enough to perform Sunday's matinee, so they didn't have to perform again on beat up legs.

Dad in Albi 

Today (Monday, my one day off while Dad's here) we hopped on a little train through the French country side to Albi, about an hour away.  The Saint Cecile Cathedral is the largest brick building in the world, and stunning, the town was charming and cosy, and the Musée de Toulouse Lautrec was fascinating.  The museum had 4 or 5 large rooms of his paintings and lithographs, including his portraits of his mother, many anonymous women from Paris' brothels, and some of his most famous posters advertising for the Moulin Rouge.  Plus a fantastic South-Western French meal of Cassoulet Toulousain for Dad and Onion Tarte and veggie soup for me, with frites that came with an ancienne sauce de Roquefort, and a little Pastis, of course.  All in all a splendid day.

More pictures and stories to come, mostly it's just wonderful to have Dad here to share in all my little French moments and get to see the little corners of life here.  :)

little sunbeams

sunshine on my walk in to the ballet

My days are getting fuller, stretching out in some really nice places, little pieces falling more into place.  So while I'm sure there are more political outbursts brewing, today I'd just like to share some vignettes of a day in my life here.

Mornings are settling into a wonderful routine, with bright crisp sunshine and bus drivers who know my smile and will stop my second bus as it's passing so I can dash across the street and save myself half of the 20 minute walk to the studio.  The Seattle girl in me is still trying to make up for the years of sun deprivation, though, so I find myself walking down the middle of the street grinning and wanting to fling my arms out wide to the sun.  Mid-October, and we've had maybe 3 days of rain in the two months I've been here? I can deal with that :)

my new teapot, and "Lets Mots" by Jean-Paul Sartre

The men at my vegetable stand at the market know me enough now to have me help them force their wares on unsuspecting passer-bys (oui oui, the mangos are great!)  and ask about how the dancing is going, when our next performance is.  I went back to the book seller where I'd searched unsuccessfully for Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo last week, and he remembered me and what I'd been looking for.  I picked up Sartre's Les Mots and so we had a quick conversation about Camus and Sartre (I was in way over my head) and I promised to report back as I worked my way through it (I'm sure it will continue to be over my head for a while).  And at long last, the pottery man was back, and I couldn't resist getting a tea pot to match my hand-painted cups.  I'm learning quickly that no matter how much cash I bring with me to the market, I can find ways of spending it all (bring less bring less!).

for chateau quatre bouffons, and their infamous bastard

Errands are getting more and more efficient, I'm finding really lovely comfortable spaces talking to strangers and getting compliments on my French, letting conversations pick up where I'm not at all invested in the outcome, so I can afford to be open to saying what I really think, and to listening to the advice they have to offer me.  Time spent wandering skinny little French streets lined with brick, and sitting at cafés people watching -- little kids being my favorite: some little ones in Halloween costumes tottering by the car that stopped to let them cross with the cutest little "merci monsieur!" you've ever heard in your life from an almost 3 foot tall knight, a wide-eyed "c'est froid!" ("it's cold!") from the little girl sharing orange juice and a croissant with her mother at the table next to me -- reminds me that I'm really here, really living my life in France.  The novelty of that hasn't worn off, and I'm excited about what more I can do to take advantage of being here as my comfort level continues to grow.  I passed this street sign as I was wandering yesterday, and couldn't resist taking a picture for my quatre-bouffons... :)

Evenings at the yoga studio are unfailingly calming and fulfilling, usually with class being followed by lovely conversations with Christine, the teacher, and Julian, my Norwegian dancer-by-day-yogi-by-night friend.  Julian is moving to a new apartment, so we spent Sunday with a few other dancers hauling the first load of stuff over (the new apartment has 3 huge floor to ceiling windows overlooking the Garonne River through the trees on the bank, it is possible I'll be moving in with him if he isn't careful) and cooking dinner and watching a movie making fun of the French northerners' strong accents and nasal quacks...  And dinners with the family are increasingly wonderful, Christine (the mum) walked in to Philippe's room the other night to catch us in the middle of a story, me and the three littlest ones piled into Philippe's little twin bed under the covers.  Tonight actually, Philippe spent a while talking just to me for the first time, (though he's always been good at just crawling into my lap when we don't have enough chair space) telling me about the comic strip they read in English class about a Jack-in-the-box and "who are you?" as a question they learned.  Super precious.  Isaure showed me her little lunchbox-sized suitcase of "Il était une fois..." stories -- once upon a time -- and I got to tell her about how I was a bird in the ballet version of Hansel and Gretel, eating up the bread crumbs.  There isn't a whole lot better than a warm cuddly little body curled up next to you reading bed time stories...

In other incredibly exciting news, my Dad's coming next week, for a week and a half, to see La Reine Morte and me, and Toulouse.  I can't wait to get to have him here, and to have a partner in crime to explore even more.  Oh, and for the next two weeks we're rehearsing and performing in the theatre, so when I say that I'm going in to work, this is what it looks like :) -->>

occupy with love, part one: life

I can't help but feel as if this year has been one of the ones that my children will ask me about; the same as people will always remember where they were on September 11, 2001, I think it will be important in the future where you were during Arab Spring, how you were participating in the global upheaval that has spread from the Middle East to Europe to the streets of Lower Manhattan. So if you'll indulge me, I'd like to spend some time talking about what I think of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and our general political and corporate landscape in the States.  Apparently something has gotten into my blood recently (slightly possible I went into a small "why I'm a vegetarian" rant at the ballet over lunch the other day...) and this turned into a post with some serious length.  For ease of reading (and because I only have so many hours to sit here at once), I'm going to spread out my fighting words over a few posts over the next few weeks.

For some context, first, I'd like to place my own little life within the greater scope of the American arts scene. I was incredibly lucky to have parents who not only raised me with love and support and creativity and high expectations, but also the financial means to offer me the ability to take advantage of the opportunities that I had in dance. That being said, I worked through high school, and spent two years dancing for Carolina Ballet making less than minimum wage because in the middle of a recession, the arts are not an industry with money. I could -- and did -- make more tutoring AP Calculus at night for an hour than in a whole day working at the ballet in a career that I'd been training for actively since I was 8 years old. I am finally -- in my almost fifth year dancing full time -- making enough money to be completely independent, which is true simply because I moved to Europe, where I'm quite officially an employee of the "Marié de Toulouse" (the Mayor's office). So when I talk about how I believe government has an obligation to provide for its citizens in a few concrete arenas, I'm literally living my dream while making a living due to the support of arts organizations by a government, though turns out I had to move to France to find it.  So, without further ado:

Government is not something to be scared of; instead, democracy's original form is one of hope, one where people willingly enter into a social contract in order to preserve and protect their essential rights and use collaboration to its best advantages.  Most of the reasons that I'm proud to claim the American side of my heritage have to do with our ideals -- that people have the power of self-governance, and can create a system in order to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all its citizens, designed to continually give individual citizens the ability to actively participate in their government.  Of course, the reality accompanying those ideals has never been perfect -- "all" used to be only rich white men, and we've progressed slowly from there over the past few centuries, and still have a ways to go.  Because the length of this post is quickly getting out of hand, I'm going to look at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as broad categories to guide the next few posts... 

Life
I believe that providing life to your citizens means a deep commitment to ensuring that people have access to clean water, healthy food, and adequate health care.  We've had a fair amount of success with getting clean drinking water to almost every corner of the country (bravo), though I'm sure there is lots to be said about the state of many of our rivers and lakes due to pollution, and hydrofracking is raising a new threat to the groundwater of surrounding communities.  Luckily I don't know much about this, so I'll refer you to Gasland, the documentary about the natural gas industry that I haven't seen yet, and call it a night.

Healthy food is another issue -- the industrialization of farming has completely changed the landscape of food. Pesticides and chemical fertilizers are widely used on huge fields of one crop, depleting the soil of nitrogen and without diversity, opening ourselves up devastating consequences of disease. In a 2007 study put out by the University of Michigan, organic farming has been shown to be equally productive to conventional methods in developed countries, and much more productive in developing ones, without exposing farmers to crushing debts incurred by buying fertilizers and seeds that aren't natural to the region. Ivette Perfecto, one of the leaders of the study, was clear about how organic farming could produce enough to feed the world, while also limiting the damaging effects of conventional farming, such as "soil erosion, greenhouse gas emission, increased pest resistance and loss of biodiversity" (see http://ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=5936 for the summary of the study).

In addition to going organic, of course, is the dramatic need to eat (and consume in other forms) more locally. The number of miles food travels to our dinner plates is huge, making the whole industry more inefficient, expensive, and illogical than it needs to be. Government subsidies of some of the largest crops (ie corn and feed grains) make it easier for corporate farms to buy up smaller family farms, encourages a lack of crop diversity, and makes high-fructose corn syrup abundantly cheap, which in turn has shaped the processed food industry. Instead, people need to be actively participating in their own diets, taking responsibility for what they put in their bodies and what their money is supporting. Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution takes a look at the American food industry and education surrounding food, and is frightening -- elementary school kids who don't know what broccoli is, or a tomato, let alone where their meat comes from (hint: live animals, not the freezer section). The amount of meat that we (er, Americans, not me) eat, for that matter, is also incredibly unsustainable (and has ripple effects due to the methane gas produced by cows contributing to global warming, the huge amounts of grain going to feed cattle rather than humans, and the environmental impacts of the massive feedlots). So there are lots of cultural changes in how we eat and think about food that need to accompany legislative shifts toward supporting smaller independent farms and suppliers of local produce rather than massive farm conglomerates. (To learn more about the things we need to do, please check out Jamie Oliver's fantastic TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html about obesity and food education).

Obesity then can be our transition into talking about the healthcare system. I also believe that our society, through government as our collaborative commitment to supporting each other in mutually beneficial goals, benefits tremendously from healthy citizens and should be making every effort to support public health. Diet-related diseases are the biggest killer in the US, hands down. Around $150 billion a year is spent here on health care for diet-related problems, and that is set to double in the next ten years. Incredibly though, we have a cure for obesity, it's not cancer or AIDS or countless other diseases where there's nothing yet we can do to get rid of it completely.  What we eat is killing us, and bankrupting the country -- in the whole debate about the national debt (which clearly included how the current social support programs have rising costs), was anyone talking about how to make people healthier, and therefore less expensive to care for?  If so, I missed it, but surely there are some serious dollar amounts worth investing now to campaign for a healthier nation (keep at it, Michelle Obama).

And then comes the insurance debate.  Many of our healthcare problems are preventable, but are early treatment and diagnosis is inaccessible to the poor or uninsured. We end up spending many times more money treating a disease later (or in the emergency room) rather than preventing it up front (75% of all health care dollars are spent on patients with one or more chronic conditions, many of which can be prevented, including diabetes, obesity, heart disease, lung disease, high blood pressure, and cancer. Source: Health Affairs). The US spent $2.5 trillion dollars on healthcare in 2009, the most per capita in the world, yet is 43rd in infant mortality rate (approximately 30,000 infants die in the United States each year. The infant mortality rate, which is the risk of death during the first year of life, is related to the underlying health of the mother, public health practices, socioeconomic conditions, and availability and use of appropriate health care for infants and pregnant women. Sources: CDC and National Center for Health Statistics), and 47th in terms of total life expectancy.  There are a lot of countries that you need to list before you get to number 43...  For the home of many of the best medical care facilities in the world, we're clearly not doing things quite right.  While our citizens are spending more time being sick, less time being productive, and missing chances to treat diseases early using less money and less time, the private insurance companies are taking home a hefty profit -- more than 20% of every dollar goes to insurance overhead costs, while simultaneously driving up hospital and physician administration fees (http://masscare.org/health-care-costs/overhead-costs-of-health-care/).  Personally, I prefer the money that I spend on health care to be going towards making sure that I'm healthy.  Surely it doesn't have to quite so complicated.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, read any articles you have to send my way, or hear more generally about how things are in your lovely lives.  Thanks for indulging me, apparently I've been having some trouble expressing myself as fully as I want to be able to in French, because this can't have come out of nowhere ;)  

la pleine lune

Sunday morning it was still cold, so I put on my winter coat and scarf and headed out to the St. Aubin market.  The vegetable stall I went to two weeks ago had moved a little bit around the corner, but the man still very cheerily recognized me as the American dancer!! and was super helpful with making sure I got the local tomatoes (even though they didn't look quite as pretty, they taste better and were cheaper, and I hadn't seen them in their far-away row).  I'm getting faster at going through the market, honing in on which stalls have the best produce, the bakery stand I always visit, the cheese-and-egg cart... :) pretty wonderful to have that be part of the weekly life here...

My spoils

A few hours of online French history lectures later (with a few fresh from the market snack breaks), Olivier (the father of the family) and I went down to the apartment of Juliana, one of the soloists in the company who is redoing her bathroom, and therefore has a big mirror she doesn't need anymore.  Olivier was a life saver, hauling the mirror down the three flights of stairs, and, you know, owning a car so we could get it back here.  I can't wait to get it hung up (in the kitchen part of my bitty studio, opposite the window so it reflects the light back) to open up the space.

Then off I dashed downtown, to one of the few English pubs in town, "The Frog and Rosbif" (roast beef), for trivia night with some of the other dancers.  Spectacularly failing at trivia, we had a good time drinking some of the pub's own microbrews and debating whether or not Steve Jobs deserved quite all the attention he was getting (if only he'd stuck around long enough to come out with iTeleport, then maybe he'd be worth some serious mourning, but alas, he went too soon).  

Today was sleepy, in a wonderful way, full of beautiful sunshine and reading my book and catching up on news of the world and a long afternoon nap and a great yoga class.  Ready to start next week, refreshed and restocked, with all sorts of yummy produce in my fridge :)  It's a full moon tonight, bringing a reflective twist to a sleepy Monday, but now it's late, so I'll save some of my ponderings for another time. 

autumn

Today was a spectacularly beautiful second day of autumn.  It's almost the middle of October, and the temperature finally dropped to crisp bright mornings and just the right amount of chill in the air to feel like fall, with none of the gray or wet I'm so used to as harbingers of the colder seasons to come from a childhood in Seattle.  Bright sun, white clouds patched across a brilliant pale blue sky, a real breeze that started to blow only a few days ago... It's lovely.  As much as I love the lazy days of summer and spending months on end outside in the sun (as a sun-starved Pacific Northwesterner, a day with sunshine is always and forever something to celebrate), there's something so wonderful about fall.  Fall has always come with new beginnings, new energy and motivations, and I'm starting to feel that spirit in the wind that's blown into town.  The season's first pot of soup is on the stove, to help guard against the chill coming in with the evening light from the open window...

All week we've had a guest teacher, Tom, who's originally from Belgium, who danced with the Royal Ballet of Flanders, the Joffrey Ballet in the States, and is now I think working in Germany... what all of that really means is that he has a ffffaaaaantastic accent.  Basically he sounds like a Scotsman trying to speak French, or some mix of French and English (English is his preferred of the two), with German thrown in occasionally for our German speakers... And he teaches a very different style of class than our normal mix of Nanette and our ballet masters, much more movement in the arms and upper body and making "figures of eight!" rather than being placed and correct and square... which naturally led to some really wonderful attempts this morning at making "figure of 11! of Z! of W! of 5!" with our bodies in the back of the studio while we were warming up before class.  Tom is funny, energetic, and smiles back at me while I'm laughing at myself, so I like him :)  And it's only two weeks, so whatever is missing from his class in terms of placement/preparation for the rehearsal day, it's not long enough to lose technique or anything anywhere near that drastic, and throwing yourself into trying to take class in his style opens up a new versatility that you'll never get if you don't at least try to do what he's asking.

It's also nice to have some juxtaposition to Nanette's constant refrain to anchor your shoulder blades down your back in order to place your whole body correctly -- she's right, of course, it's how you initiate movement from your back rather than your exterior limbs, but in my attempts to "pull my shoulder blades down harder than I ever have before in my life" I feel myself getting stiff in my movement quality.  Tom's classes, with their twists and turns and movey-dancy-gorgeous-spin feeling, are forcing me to not be stiff, and then I can remember on my own that my shoulder blades need to be down, and make some of those brain-muscle connections for myself while preserving the breath of it.  Not sure if that's way too much technical dance exploration for my laypeople, but thought I'd at least give you a glimpse.

Nutcracker has also started, despite the many months between now and Christmas.  Snow and Flowers are taught and rehearsed, in around 4-5 hours each, to be picked up again sometime in November or December.  Meanwhile, La Reine Morte is getting closer and closer to done, with one week left in the studio.  Working with Kader (who will take over the directorship next year) has been really great, with a ton of attention to detail and work on finding the style of each dance and character.  Tuesday afternoon we have only half a rehearsal day, with the rest of the day scheduled as an "Essayage (Tutti)" -- Costume Fitting (for everyone) -- so we'll see how the final workings of the costumes come out.  They should be pretty wild, with long ball gowns in various metallics for the Cortisans, men with large collars and hats, a full skullcap-to-fingertip white mesh connected to a some version of a white tutu for the Second Act Mariées (again with the dead women ghosts), the Jesters (bouffons) in brightly colored full-body unitards covered in tumorous bulges in contrasting colors and with pointed (for the boys) and spherical (for the girls) attachments to go under the unitard on top of their heads... yeah, that one might just need to have a picture, words can't quite do justice to the mayhem of the fabric...

As always, more to come.  Sending out good wishes to all of you --  happy fall everyone!

paris

10 o’clock Saturday evening:  

I arrive in Paris, the city of lights, the city of love, the city with a history stretching back to the Roman empire, the city that has inspired artists and intellectuals and philosophers and revolutionaries for centuries.  Not such a bad place to be.  I’m here to stay with Lyse, my second cousin who's here studying for the fall at Science Po and tomorrow, and see Nina, my friend from Seattle who's on a European exchange from her Swedish Masters in Anthropology program to study here until December.

Coming out of the subway stop to meet Lyse, I was greeted by the center of the traffic-round-about of six lion statues spouting water out of their mouths, (not so bad) and her smiling face.  Seven stories up her apartment building’s wooden spiral staircase, we reach her absolutely adorable Parisian home – two rooms plus a kitchen and bathroom, bright colors, a deep bathtub (but no place to stand and shower), and a view of the whole neighbourhood.  We stayed up late catching up and swapping French bureaucracy war stories.

 Sunday, Day 1:

  

Today was lovely, sunny and warm and full of beautiful wanderings and good food and catching up with friends.  We slept in, had tea and breakfast in Lyse's sunny top floor apartment, and set off to wander.  Starting at the Louvre, we worked our way up and down the Jardins de Touilleries, passing statues and tourists and locals taking in October sunrays.  From the Louvre and Palais Royale, we walked down to the Mirais (the Jewish quarter), which is the one humming neighbourhood on a Sunday, to meet Nina.  Having found my long lost Swede, we honed in on a falafel restaurant (craftily following the trail of happy people with street food) and had a fantastic lunch.  They seriously knew what they were doing with that kitchen. I was planning on taking a picture, but… I was hungry.  It disappeared very quickly....

We were in Paris, so some shopping may or may not have happened.  Sizes are different in French, but I’m starting to get the hang of it.  Lyse went to go pick up her boyfriend, Simon, from the airport (he’s here for almost two weeks to visit Paris for the first time) and Nina and I went on a lovely date, splitting a slice of cheesecake and sitting on the bank of the Seine people watching for a little before meandering past the Notre Dame… I sent Nina home, to rest up before her first day of real French classes, and made my way back to Lyse’s to meet Simon, where the three of us helped him combat jetlag by staying up until past midnight talking politics, comparing American, Canadian, and French customs and policies, and figuring out all the basics for saving the world.  Lyse is taking some history courses here, as well as being well-informed about the major monuments and events of Paris, and talking with her all weekend got me re-excited about history.  I’d love to do some investigations into the history of the churches of Toulouse – from her guidebook, we have the most pure Romanesque church in Europe, built in 1049, and another one that exhibits a mishmash of architecture styles from throughout the two centuries it took to build it – and the history of the region in general.  My efforts to figure out the best way to do that (French vs English? For credit vs not? Online vs In-person classes?) are continuing, but the motivation is much higher.

Monday Day 2:

Sunlight streaming in through the windows signaled the start of another slow morning, today with fresh pastries from the bakery downstairs and tea, before we headed out to Notre Dame.  Simon, Lyse and I hopped on the Metro, switching to some combination of French and quiet English (gotta love Canadians) and smiling to ourselves about the lovely Frenchman in a suit eating his baguette sandwich and éclair.  Sooooo French.

So, Notre Dame.  Again, I think all of us caught the history bug – seeing a building that old, that huge, and that intricate, forces you to wonder about the people who watched it getting built and whether they knew it would continue to compel people to come visit it this many centuries later.  What were the stories of the designers, the craftsmen, the quarrymen?  From whose imagination were the faces of the gargoyles born, who first dreamed of a stained-glass archway on such a massive scale?

Emmanuel

We climbed the stone spiral staircase up and up and up to the first landing, at the north-west corner of the building, with a view from Mont-Martre to the Eiffel Tower.  Inching past gargoyles and stone demons in the Galerie des Chimères along the western façade of the church, we took in Paris from above.  From there, we ducked through the hobbit-sized door into Quasimodo’s domain.  Up dark, age-smoothed wooden stairs, the bourdon, the church’s largest bell, hung silent, rung only on the major Catholic holidays.  They have four smaller bells in the north tower that mark the time, and the layer of dust on this one – christened Emmanuel – begged for someone to duck under the flimsy rope to commit what I’m sure must be some kind of horrible crime.  I contained myself, though as Lyse said, once it’s rung, it’s not as though they can un-ring it….  Now towards the top of my to-do list: read Notre Dame de Paris in Victor Hugo’s original French. 

Up another spiral staircase equally long, you reach the top of the church.  The stone is worn down in the middle of each step, a smooth indent in each stair from millions of feet making the trek up to the height of the southern tower for a full panorama of the city. 

As nice as the view from the top is, the inside of the church is where its scale becomes more dazzling.  The size of the arches, the many alcoves for prayer to individual saints, the walls themselves… throughout the entire building you can feel the history, the weight of centuries of people’s desperate prayers and joyful hopes and searching questions… Even as a very clearly not-anything-close-to-Catholic, the stories in the stones of the building are compelling.

From Notre Dame, we went to a café near the train station to meet up with Nina for a late lunch before I hopped on the train back to Toulouse.  Five hours of reading and journaling later, I made it back to my now ”normal” life – renewed and ready to dive into a week full of rehearsals all day everyday for La Reine Morte and Nutcracker.  It was great to have gotten the chance to be in Paris without having any strong tourist-y agenda, so I could focus on just being where I was and who I was with instead of trying to race through a checklist of Must-See's.  I can't wait to go back and continue exploring more of what Paris -- and all of France -- has to offer.  All in all, a very successful weekend!