Geneve Journal: Klee Kringle

We received a light cover of snow last night, just in time for Christmas. It's a welcome touch, but still not quite as xmasy feeling as my day spent in Bern on Dec 8th.

Snow had reached Geneva the day before.  I had a great view of the slow tumbling from my apartment/workspace window, and enjoyed watching the particular brand of drawing done in the snow by the groundskeepers' brooms. It was a hefty dusting, but much of it was gone from the pavement by late in the afternoon, even as it the flakes sputtered down through the evening. Making my way home that night, I was subjected to a bizarre vision of insects scurrying about beneath the light of a lamppost.  More bizarre yet was the falling of a snowflake, landing right on top of such an insect.  This happened not once, but twice and almost/maybe three times before I realized that the insects were actually shadows cast by the falling flakes.

The surrounding environs had been much harder hit and this was evident from my view from the train I took the next morning (Saturday, Dec 8) to Bern.

My objective for the day was all Paul Klee, with planned visits to the Zentrum Paul Klee and the Kunstmuseum of Bern.  The anniversary of Klee's birthday (Dec 18, 1879) was observed last week. 

The center of Bern

Bern on this day was a true winter wonderland.  Just enough snow to lend the effect of the quintessential Christmas village but not enough to choke off any fondness for that season.

My first objective was The Zentrum Paul Klee.  Home of the archives, research center and collection of the artist's work.  Located outside the center of town, it's a relatively short bus ride to the ZPK which houses two exhibition spaces a theater and educational workshops.  There were two exhibits on view at the time of my visit; The Angels of Klee and Master Klee! Teacher at the Bauhaus.  The first exhibit is a group exhibit of work by various contemporary artists which ties loosely, and at times tenously to Klee's body of work focusing on angels.  These angel works, charming though they may be, and popular for sure, and fitting given the holiday season, lack the meat of his other work.   These drawings, watercolors and a few oils lie at the center, literally, of the exhibit, occupying the core galleries of the exhibition space and ringed by the by the contributions of the other artists.   En masse, the Klee angels are light fare, but the assembled selection of other artists works amounts to an imaginative selection. This assembled group offered some entertaining and amusing inclusions; a segment of a Charlie Chaplin film, Beuys' I love America and America Loves Me, Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire.  For me, the most compelling work and the one that drove me to linger the longest was Ejia-Liisa Ahtila's The Annunciation. Three screens, often showing differing vantage points of the same scene.  Rudimentarily, one could say that Atilla is presenting a vision replete with cubist sensibilities. Offering three views of any given moment. - but even as the viewing potential of the scene if tripled, I feel even more aware of those corners that I'm not seeing.  The gist of the piece is the casting and production of a rendition of the annunciation....sort of a meta documentary - metacumentary .....if can one say that.  quasi-scripted, quasi-captured narrative of a group of Finnish women as they rehearse and prepare for a performance - not for a public performance per se, but for the viewer of this artwork.

Views out either side of the glass corridor connecting two of the "hills" that house components of the ZPK.

The exhibit in the lower gallery, focused on Klee's role as teacher, and the works were organized in sections according to chapters .
Over all, the offerings of Klee works at the ZPK at this time, given the focus of the two exhibits, felt thin and timid.  If I came to Bern and was looking to really dig in to Klee's work and this was all that was on view, I'd feel a little shorted.  Fortunately, there was more Klee being offered elsewhere in Bern, and it was on my agenda.

Some scenes outside the ZPK.

After I exited the museum (designed by Renzo Piano) I saw a placard showing the walking paths around the center, as well as Klee's place of burial.  This seemed an added bonus so I decided to check it out.

Maybe 60 yards up a little street, I came upon spiraling mound of earth topped by a tree just before the gate of a cemetery.   At the opening of a path leading to and up the spiral is a street sign saying Luft-Station.  Was this mound Klee's grave?  The signage wasn't clear to me.  There was a placard for the Luft-Station which quoted the inscription on the artists grave.   In the end, after mounting, then descending the spiral, I saw a map sign on the gate that showed where the grave of Klee is located.  I couldn't find it.  As I learned later, from image I found online, Klee's grave is a low horizontal slab and was well covered by snow during my visit.

I'm still not entirely sure about the nature of the Luft-Station form.  The signpost says it is the title of one of his works.  In front of the entrance of the ZPK stands a giant orange linear sculpture called Unstable Signpost (labiler Wegweiser).  This sculpture is a three dimensional rendition of an image from on of Klee's drawings of the same title.  Has such a similarly drawn form given inspiration to the Luft-Station "sculpture"?  I don't know.  That is my assumption, but my not-so-rigorous search for info has not yielded any.  The only mentions of Luft-Station I've seen online refer to this formation and the prime views it offers of the surrounding Alps.  I couldn't make out the distant peaks on the overcast day of my visit, but I was more enthralled by the structure itself and the peaceful wintry passage I had all to myself.

I hopped back on the bus into town with the aim of visiting the Paul Klee/Johannes Itten exhibit at the Kunstmuseum.  I descended from the bus in the middle of town to walk through the streets and find my way to the museum.

The ingenuity of the medieval alpine architecture intrigued me on my first visit to Bern and continued to do so on this visit.  The the major streets are lined on both sides by covered porticos.  The ground floor shops are recessed, allowing for a covered passageway protected from the weather.  It's the prototypical mall.   The integration of this inside/outside utility of the buildings still impresses me by its urbanity and civility.

 I walked through a Christmas market of stalls filled with crafted goods, although there was not much that spoke to me.  Much of it was like what you'd expect to find in any Christmas market anywhere, but the stall selling Native American dream catchers really punctuated this point while also bursting some little bubble of assumption of indigenous authenticity.   Another market was devoted to largely to flowers and Christmas wreaths and swags of fir and pine.  This was more interesting to me and even tempted me to pick up some sweet smelling branches of fir.

A sculpture of barricades?

The exhibit Itten-Klee: Cosmos of Color at the Kunstmuseum delivers the goods on Klee with an ample sampling of works throughout his career, including some real great exemplars of his power as an artist.  There are also many paintings by Johannes Itten on view and a few are relatively successful - but only a few, to my mind.  A possible alternate exhibition title  I could have suggested is Klee Klobbers Itten.  I can imagine the exhibition curator saying "this is not a competition at all, but an extensive comparison of how the two local artists developed their influential theories of color in parallel, but individual ways."    Upon reflection I agree, the exhibit layed out among 11 galleries is not a competition.  It couldn't possibly be a competition, not because it was not intended as a competition (which is something you can't truly contro) but because Klee simply smokes Itten into oblivion; blows him out of the water in terms of inventiveness, sensitivity to composition and handling of materials and in presenting work imbued with a humanity and charm.  No, you can't help but make a qualitative comparison between two artists when they're presented side by side.  There is no contest here;  Klee outclasses Itten on virtually every level.  This was the refrain that was repeatedly in my consciousness whenever confronted with a switch from one artist to the other in the exhibit layout.    Itten surely new how to mix color mighty well.  Benjamin Moore or Sherwin Williams would probably gladly have him on their teams, and there are some truly intense and brilliant color pairings in a group of larger paintings in the show's final gallery.  But I think the unintended message of this exhibit is that although both of these Swiss- born men were influential teachers, one man became a true artist, the other remained a teacher who made colorful paintings.

My own riff on an Itten composition, watercolor, pastel and pencil.

 
I didn't NEED to go to Bern to see work by Klee.  His paintings are not unknown entities in NY.  I am lucky to have timed my travel to coincide with this particular show because of the range and breadth of the work included, which was what I was hoping/assuming I'd find in coming to his home town.  Klee presages many abstract painters to come in the work shown in this exhibit.  And much of it is still fresh, very fresh.  Fresh enough to think one was strolling through some contemporary gallery in Brooklyn.  One particular painting, actually oil pastel on done on a cloth napkin is R A W and real tight. Monochromatic geometric shapes on a white aging piece of fabric.  And a couple of other works done on burlap - small - had the presence of a much larger piece.
Well worth the trip and, as a whole, as an experience of viewing Klee - the painter, much more satisfying than the work I saw at the ZPK.

There were a couple of other special exhibits at the Kunstmuseum.  Otto Nebel, Painter and Poet, directly downstairs from the Klee- Itten show, almost felt like an extension of that exhibit.  Nebel was a slightly younger contemporary of the other two artists.  This extensive exhibit of his work shows how he, like any artist of his time, danced through the influences of the established practitioners of the abstract language from the early 20th C.  There are Kandinsky-like paintings, Klee-like paintings, etc with little tweaks....like an almost-Kandinsky, but with a unique textured surface.  He was involved in some interesting exercises testing out the communicative capacity of visual form, seemingly creating a series of abstract codes.  I think he really hit his spot with a series of compelling vertical, quasi-cubist paintings of church and cathedral interiors.   Intricate, jewel-like, with the feel of stone columns, cornices and arches depicted as if in stained glass, but with a textured body.  I found these to be unique and beautiful.  This very poor example does at least give a sense of the compositional elements shared by most of this body of paintings.

As it turns out, there were several examples of possibly brave but usually unfair pairings of artists' works throughout the Kunstmuseum's galleries.  Moving through the permanent collection rooms, the timeline of works of the 20th C was skewed here and there to offer examples of serendipity and similarity between different eras.  I don't have notes from these, but some of them were interesting, both from an experiential and educational standpoint.  There was one artist (I don't recall the name, but the work was very recent.  I assumed a relatively young one artist) who had the fortune and misfortune to be hanging next to a small dark Rothko.  By comparison, this artist's work, which shared some tonality, and even manner of application, look thin, insignificant and cheap - and none of that in a good way.
Similarly, another temporary exhibit, Meret's Sparks, Surrealisms in Contemporary Swiss Art, comprised of  select examples of Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim's work set among the works of contemporary Swiss artists, each with his or her own gallery.  More often than not, the one or two examples of Oppenheim's collages, drawings or assemblages in a gallery flattened the generally more numerous and more expansive offerings by the contemporary artist in question.  There were one or two really interesting artists showing; Maya Bringolf, and some of Elisabeth Llach's work worked, but overall, the comparison with Oppenheim's succinct offering made the bulk of everything else seem very thin.

I was excited to see that in a side gallery the museum had an advent calendar in process.  A grouping of collection artworks were gathered, and covered with Tyvek sheathing.   Some of these works had been revealed, with the majority still covered.  I think it's a great idea...particularly for a museum that's willing and able to put some great works into the project....unfortunately, the works that had been revealed were all rather dusty and uninteresting...not giving me much faith that the remaining covers had much to offer what they concealed.  Do this thing at MoMA, and I think you'd get something wonderful and exciting happening between the works.

I spent quite a while looking at Ferdinand Hodler's painting The Night.   It's a pretty incredible painting.

I returned to Geneva late that afternoon.
And on this Christmas day, I'm returning to that afternoon in Bern and the touch of Christmas it offered.

One angel not included in the Klee angel exhibit.  This one found in a vitrine in town.

Geneve Journal: Dec 5-7

My first visit to CERN was the result of bad navigation.  I made an appointment for my second visit.  This time 'round, I came to CERN to record an interview with Ariane Koek, the force behind the Collide@CERN artist residency program at the scientific research center.  When I say she is the force behind the program, she really is the force, the dreamer and creator of the entire Arts@CERN initiative which includes the Collide program, she is the curator, producer, administrator, artist relations person, camp counselor, tour guide, house mother, fundraiser and pr person. The residency program, which took full effect this year with the first two resident artists, is the result of a feasibility study conducted by Koek while she herself was in residency at CERN as a Clore Fellow.  She made her case and the administration of CERN invited her to establish and run the arts initiative.   Collisions are the reason for being - for the Large Hadron Collider, and the invocation of that term for the name of the residency program is not just a poetic affect.  Ms. Koek is determined to create the kind of collisions of culture that tweak, irritate and enliven the experiencial landscape of the CERN campus.

"...dancers perform while a scientist reads in Cern's library." Photograph: Maximillien Brice/cern.

via: The Guardian

I was taken by the notion that the arts program was not, as I expected, born of some institutional process of development by committee, but rather pushed into being through the imagination and initiative of a single individual that was then embraced by the institution.   There a certain poetic feedback loop that the Collide program's objectives of instigating and nurturing creative interactions which bridge the two research disciplines of art and science are in fact harbored deep within it's own DNA. 
The audio I recorded will find its way into an upcoming Dead Hare Radio podcast, along with more links and information. 

My interview with Ariane Koek took place on Wednesday.  Early in the day on Thursday, I returned to the Musee d'art e d'histoire, and this time, the painting galleries were open.  It was a quick visit although was struck by some familiar but forgotten faces on the walls of those galleries.  Specific works of Félix Edouard Vallotton, Giovanni Giacometti, Ferdinand Hodler and others, as it turns out, had lodged themselves into deep recesses in my brain, this became only evident when standing directly in front of these works. 

On this visit my attention was commandeered by the pastels of Jean-Ètienne Liotard.  Really exquisite and glowing pastel portraits that seem more radiant and compelling because of the medium in which they're created.  In this group of drawings, the rosy illuminated flesh tones luxuriate in relation to the clear powdery blue in many of the sitters' garments.  I'll work on getting some images to plug into this post.  The image above is a brochure that accompanied an exhibit of Liotard drawings which I visited multiple times when it was mounted at the museum in 1992. 

Andre Dussoix, acrylic on canvas, via: karaartservers.ch

On Thursday, I arranged my second (re)meeting of the trip with artist Andre Dussoix.  Andre was among the group of artists, musicians and writers I encountered first in 1992.  I have a publication given to me by Andre at that time which accompanied a multi media group exhibit which took place in 1984 and included the work of several members of this circle .

Espace Corps, large format publication.

 Even though I've never been able, nor have I really tried to read the publication in French which has long served in my mind as a talisman emblematic of the ideal of the creative collective.  What I garnered from this group of artists-friends, who are collectively my elders by about 20 yrs, is the representation of the possibility of maintaining productive creative relationships through the long haul.  I recorded a conversation with Andre in his home in which he detailed his progression as an artist long invested in the conjunction of moment and painting and he gave a little insight on the type of environment that exists for artists Geneva.

Xavier Dussoix, metal, plexi glass, lighting fixture.

Andre's two sons Hadrien and Xavier are both artists, and I recorded conversations with both of them  the following week. I had met Xavier back in 1992, even painting a gestural figurative image on his motorcycle helmet back then.  I hadn't met Hadrien on my previous trip, so my opportunity to meet him for the first time came on Friday, Dec 7 at a closing reception of sorts at his studio at Theatre le Grutli, a multi purpose arts venue that houses a handful of artists studios on its top floor.  Studio space - let alone affordable studio space - is in short supply in Geneva, particularly with the demise, in recent years, of the squats.  The city of Geneva has a program providing work spaces to select artists free of charge for a period of three years.  The reception at Hadrien's studio marked the close of his three years in residence at Grutli.

The doorway to Hadrien Dussoix's studio.

Hadrien's recent paintings of renditions of baroque interiors created with spray painted details over generally flat expanses of background colors predominated the studio space, but also visible were sculptures and samples of his text paintings.

I particularly liked the series of collaged skull and crossbones which are made using various found and painted skulls and masks with the crossbones being form from collaged images from porn magazines which almost all included a cleaved buttocks (or close proximity) standing in for the archetypical joints capping each bone. 

Geneve Journal: Dec 4

After my appointment with Jérôme Hentsch, waiting for the tram at Place de Neuve, my eye was caught by a geometric anomally in the distance which I pursued and observed.

In the studio today

Geneve Journal: Torch Bearing Shrub

A view toward the Petit Palais in 1992

You might think that the extent of my Genevois arboreal reflections related in the previous post would be limited to just one post.  But no.  They continue...

I'd like to make visible the my mental map of Geneva. But this is impossible because, in considering the impressions of a place in Geneva from my memory, I conjure the place itself, not  its relation to other places in that realm.  Those ligatures and linkages between specific places are lost in a dream fog.  It's a kinetic map, this mental one I have.  One in which places roam and flitter around in an undefined cluster like a swarm of gnats.  Navigation through this virtual terrain is achieved by a series of leading cuts or edits, as in a film; a specific action or route is not seen but is felt through the info expressed in the segments prior to and post-transit.
The primary factor in this Cartesian impossibility is that this mental map doesn't actually mark where locations are.  It marks where places are not, and generally only when confronted with the actual encounter with actual places in actual space.  In fact, these moments of virtual/actual locational discord are the ones in which my mental map is most clearly defined, if only for an instant, as I try to reconcile the two.


One such defining encounter in Geneva was with the Musee duPetit Palais, a rather confined, - and now that I'm writing this I'm recalling - dank modernist monument and shop of horrors.  I'm recalling a cellar level gallery - velvet hanging walls(? ) The building itself is far from modern, but I remembering housing a collection of early and mid century modernist art.  We're talking about modernism in the historical sense here, I can't even find a website for this joint.

Nevertheless, I was suprised to walk out of the Art and Archeology library and encounter - not only the museum, but along with it, a profoundly memorable sight.  In '92, approaching the PP from another location, I turned a corner and for a split second, I was presented with a shrub with arms upraised, holding torches.  This was a living, respiring, auto-anthropomorphological organism, complete with gilt flames.  Whoa.  What trippy, surreal sight that was.   I snapped what turned out to be a disappointing photo of this vision, which of course, I would have known until months later when I had the film developed back in the states.  Those were the days of deferred visual gratification, kids - no embedded LED screens.  My memory of that shrub was sharpened by my inability to capture it with my camera.  In fact the image at the top of this post is that very photo.

Detail of the armed shrub, 1992

The surprise encountering this torch limbed shrub again was doubly powerful.  Although I'd never forgotten this shrub, it never entered my thinking when drawing up my list of sites to see/things to do while in Geneva, and in any case, I hadn't expected to find it where I did, walking home from the library.

The shrub today.

I immediately recognized my chance, finally, to get the effect I failed to achieve twenty years before.  I snapped some pictures but for some reason, just couldn't get the effect right.  It was only after returning home that night and looking at the original photo which I brought along with me that I realized that this shrub had changed.  It too had twenty years to grow - even under the suppressive shears of some gardener.   This plant is now taller and wider by a couple of feet - while I've gotten, wider and slightly shorter in the same period.

A zoomed in almost-approximation of the 1992 vantage.

Part of the potential objective of this trip  is to find, if they exist, the quantifiable differences between the two moments, my two selves and my perception of that single place(s).  How to achieve that objective is part of the meat of the project, to be sussed out through the various media I'm bending toward that end.

I could see that better than my own fuzzy recollections, this chance photographic record of an encounter and re-encounter with a personally phenomenologically imbued location, could give a tangible, nearly-natural illustration of the time that has past. 
Not a perfect measurement, for sure, since this bush has continued to be trimmed and trained for the past twenty years.  But then, my own experience has not been without the mitigating influences of outside forces.
Reviewing the photos, I saw that my original perspective of the torches and plant was from some distance away.  I returned a few days later to try to recreate the original vantage.  My effort was foiled by another, perhaps more accurate measurement of the time that has passed.  A stand of trees which not existed before were now partially screening the view, rendering replication of an already difficult to capture image impossible.  An added obstacle is the parking sign that is now in front of the shrub.

In any case, the armed shrub I saw in 1992 doesn't exist anymore.  And, like the claims of Sasquatch sitings, I have only vague photographic documentation as proof of it's once existence.

sketchbook, 12.8.12

______________________________________

I should say that I'm back in the States now, having returned on Tuesday night (Dec 18).  There were a few other trees that caught my eye and which I caught with my camera in my final days in Geneva. 

They're almost self portraits, particularly the last two tall ones, whose shabbiness could not entirely be pruned into repression.  Although I can empathize a lot with those little brown ones too.

Geneve Journal: Dec 2-3

The movement of events, and my efforts of working on drawings, writings and recording some conversations with artist has curtailed what I had intended to be frequent posts relating to my time in Geneva.  It became clear early that the best I can do in short order is to give a general diary of my doings, since any deeper reflections, of which there have been some, would be longer in developing into a form suitable for sharing.  Alas, even that basic diaristic posting was back burnered pretty quickly.  Now, with a handful of days left in my time here, I'm going to try to sketch out the calendar of the past two plus weeks over the course of the next couple of days.

My previous post left off as the intrepid traveller oogled some terrifically weird and badly painted nudes at the Plainpalais flea market.

The following day, Sunday, I met up with an American woman living in France who I had met in '92.  I met Muriel in a small gallery in Hermance, a village further up the lake right on the frontier with France.  She invited me to dinner and invited me to stay at her place if I ever needed it.  I think I ended up staying at Muriel's house for a week or more and largely running around the area with her daughter Cheryl, and a couple of times hitchhiking back into Switzerland to catch the bus into Geneva. 
 On this Sunday, I met Muriel at the cathedral in Geneva and we drove to her place for lunch, stopping first to stroll around Hermance.

Plane trees in Hermance.

The communities around the lack all sport these bizarre looking trees.  They are often bulbous and deformed looking.  They're called plane trees and are actually a kind of sycamore, which makes sense given the look of their bark.  But the manner in which the trees are pruned all through renders them a little weird, mildly disgusting.  Muriel told me the name of the tree on our drive.  For 20 yrs, I thought of them as weird alien trees, but waited until this moment in the car to actually ask someone what they're called.  I half expected - or hoped they were a mystery to everyone. 

This memorial was carved by the deceased - prior to being deceased.

There were a couple examples of natural stones engraved with the names of the decedents.  I don't think I've seen this in American cemeteries.  They're very lovely.

After walking through the streets of Hermance, its beach and its cemetery, we crossed into France and had really scrumptious vegetarian lasagna.  My stomach recalls Muriel's status as a great cook perhaps more than my conscious memory.  Although, I remember one morning when we were devouring her homemade beignets as soon as they came out of the pan.

After lunch we drove up to Amphion/Publier.to collect rocks along the lake shore which she is using to - little by little - to build up the grade of a turnaround at her house.  

Another plane tree in Amphion.

There are a couple of baby sequoia trees in Amphion les Bains

 After collecting a couple of shopping bags of stones, we drove a little further to Evian - the place where the water is from.  Also on the lake, Evian has a quaint resort-like town center which feels a little like Vail in the Summer - except very French. 

There's a fountain flowing with Evian right from the source.  As we approached the fountain, couple was loading up their car with bottles they had brought to fill up with the stuff.   We each took a couple of swigs and descended the pitched streets back toward the lake.  We stopped in the church to take a look.  A simple but elegant, this church features a little aesthetic twist.  High up on the wall, flanking the nave are two rows of round paintings, I imagine depicting the stations of the cross.  only one is illuminated at time, for some short duration, then next one is lit.  What's crazy about thes paintings are that they are done in a very VERY naive manner.  Bright colors, flatly depicted scenes with naively rendered, cartoon-y figures, googly eyes and all.  The degree of craft feels very much like the homemade mural restoration of a portrait of Jesus done by that woman in Spain.  Just much more colorful.  It's unlike anything I've seen in a church.  Pretty wild and pretty great.  Although, I think they'd be hard to look at for long...not a type of imagery that inspires long contemplative study.  It makes me wonder if the sequential lighting scheme isn't just for preserving the work itself, but preserving the sensibilities of church goers.   It might be just too much to take in it's full gory glory.  If I can find any info on this work, I'll update it here.

So that was my Sunday with Muriel.  It was pretty great.  I caught the bus back to Geneva, and strolled around just a bit before catching the bus back to the apartment.
Spent sometime looking at the installation of gas can baby-devils decorating the tree outside the eglise de Madelaine on the Rue de Purgatoire. 

L'enfer de Bibi

Created by the artist Bibi and titled L'enfer de Bbi, it's one of the more interesting illuminated trees sprinkled around vieille ville. 

Les Delices

The following day was rainy/snowy, and my only venture to the outside was to visit Les Delices, which was Voltaire's first residence during his long exile in the region.   Along with manuscripts of Voltaire's writing and various artworks by artists of Voltaire's acquaintance, some of them depicting him throughout the house, the 2nd floor is devoted Houdon's sculpture of the seated old man.

Geneve Journal: Update, Nov 29-Dec 1

Met up with Mathias Aubert around midday.  We had lunch and ran to an art store so I could pick up a few things.
Mathias' cousin Tiffany was appearing in a production called Psychodrame 3 at the Theatre Saint-Gervais, so we decided to go.
We arrived a bit early, so we took in an exhibit of work by Gea Augsbourg.  Mostly loose, caricature-esque drawings of society types.  It's a kind of typical mid century Frenchie portraiture imbued with a facility of drawing that I can envy, but which I find boring to look at. The works that did interest me were some made while the artist was in NY and Atlanta.  These are quick "reportage" drawings of life in the streets.  I have to admit to a solipsistic interest in the symmetry, as Mathias said "He was a Swiss artist in NY, and you are here."

A sketch of Madison Sq Garden by Gea Augsbourg.

A Space Invader work in the stairwell.

 Given the title of the play we were set to see, I was expecting some sort of noirish thriller, even after Mathias reported that it was an example of "new theater" production.  As we entered the theater we were given our show "kits".  This is when we learned the show was going to be interactive and participatory.
I took this news pretty calmly.  Participatory theater is normally something I try to avoid - even when it's conducted in a language of which I have a command.   French is not such a language.  I didn't panic, though.  I was resolved to sit tight and pray I would not be called out of the audience for any kind of role playing game.

The kits with which we were armed were made up of a pen, a short stack of white, Post-It sized pieces of paper clipped to a piece of cardboard and a pair of ear plugs.

The piece started in Spanish, actually- easy spanish for certain, and it comforted me.  Shortly after the intro, though, the standard theater form was "broken" and the writer, and main protagonist, Oscar Gomez Mata, explained that what we were in for was an example of a theater "atelier" or theater workshop.  The nuance of everything that followed was lost on me.  However, I was able to comprehend the general direction of the narration, including a riff on the dichotemous nature of Geneva as both an open, welcoming International city and as a closed provincially conservative enclave (as evidenced by the Canton's bisected heraldic crest depicting an eagle with opened wing on one side and a skeleton key on the other), a trip unfused with Bertolt Brecht essence (was it a trip to his home?), and footage of recent demonstrations in Madrid.

We in the audience were invited to write words or phrases - one per piece- on the paper provided in our kit.  Were the words meant to be aspirational?  I can't remember.  After an interim, we were instructed to fold in half and place the paper in boxes being passed through the aisles.  After all the paper was collected, the boxes were passed back and we were to pick three pieces of paper out of the box.   We were then invited to arrange these word/phrase combinations into randomized poetry and read them through microphones being passed around.

My found poetry elements: manifestaion, Etre un ami des homme, TRAVAIL

I never used my ear plugs.   Overall, the work was an exercise in the theatrical principles of action and inaction through a plotted course of scripted narration and orchestrated, but unexpected response.  It was a play about a workshop of theater, as metaphor of life AND theater, captured as a unique theatrical moment all in pursuit of a utopian ideal, all with a very play-like ending.  I can't explain more, as, I'm sure much was lost to me and my franco-ingarus ears.  I ultimately did get up and do a little jig (speaking quasi-metaphorically), and it was a good experience.
Even more satisfying was talking about and critiquing the work with Mathias and Tiffany at the bar afterward.  Don't ask me to recount any of that, but for someone who's been more and more exposed to the participatory actions of artists in the gallery/museum environment, which generally don't go much farther than a call and response sort of moment of exchange, that Oscar Gomez Mata takes the added step of fitting these moments of intercourse into a broader narrative work, is ...I can't think of another word but interesting - but I mean that favorably.
The last ten minutes of each performance - the moment in which the audience is the action - are recorded and posted to vimeo. The L'Alakran website has links to these videos (our performance was on Nov 29th).

The following day, I did a little work on postcards for my kickstarter supporters then a couple of hours wandering around.  As the sun set, preparations were underway for the Christmas light festival around the old town.
I made the mistake choosing to take a short nap at around 7pm.  The nap wasn't so short.  I woke up just before 11pm.  Groggy, I thought I detected the sound of human commotion intermingling with the normal, constant soft but high pitched tone that is my co-inhabitant in this apartment.  This new sound got me out of bed.  I did a quick search online to see if something was a foot in town.  I couldn't find anything definite.   I got myself ready to head outside and follow the sound to it's origin.  My hunt didn't take long.  Just outside on the Rte de Florrisant, there was a foot race in progress.  The street was lined with spectators shouting  ALLEZ ALLEZ ALLEZ! and some beating on drums and pots.  It was a big race, and as most of the hundreds of runners I saw had LED lights strapped to their heads, I assumed it was part of the Lumiere fest.  It took me a few moments to realize that the lights were a normal accessory for runners running at night.  It was just in their collective mass, that I interpreted this illumination as some form of a performance or installation.
This was the Course du Duc, a prelude to the all day series of races set for the next day, Saturday, which wind through the streets of old Geneva.  The races are a part of the observance of L'Escalade, a celebration of the Genevois repulsion of French Savoyard invaders back in 1602.  The vanquishing of the French is emblemized by a Genevoise woman who, from on high, tossed her pot of hot stew on on a soldier as he passed by.

A storefront history lesson.

 Every patisserie and chocolate shop is laden with these chocolate stew pots with marzipan vegetables inside.

The celebration continues this weekend with, as I understand, revelry and period costumes and the opening of a secret passageway that descends from the vieille ville. 
That's on for this coming weekend, on this past Saturday I met up with Mathias again at the Promenade des Bastions where the Course de L'Escalade races were starting and ending,.  His father, who's run in this event for 50 yrs, and his younger brother were both participating.

Some kids in their pre-race warm up in the Place Neuve.

This is a pretty serious deal.  Some 2500 runners of all ages participated in the races throughout the day.  I was particularly struck by the teams of kids preparing with their trainers.

A pretty great sculpture.

Forsaking the crowds, Mathias and I parted, he to a Godard film and me to the flea market at Plaine de Plainpalais.

Plaine de Plainpalais

That's some head of hair.

Might be my xmas card this year.

 More wandering, back through the old town, and back home to work some more.
I came back out later in the afternoon to visit the Musee de l'art et l'histoire.  Museum visitors were relegated to the archeological and applied art galleries as the painting and sculpture galleries were all closed.  They remained closed a when I returned a couple of days later, I learned, due to a shortage staff, and due to temperature conditions being too cold.


So all of this gives you a rough update through Saturday, Dec 1.