I really must leave Paris and move ahead with my life. The thing is…I’ve been, off and on, obsessing about our last evening there and, while I’ve covered that week’s happenings in some detail, apparently, I do not want it to end. But all good things…and all that….
Let me plunge right back into that dark and rainy evening. September 27th it was. Teresa and I had tickets for DANCE ME – MUSIQUE DE LEONARD COHEN at Théâtre du Châtelet to be performed by Ballets Jazz Montréal. I was nervous. A natural reaction to visiting a special friend I hadn’t seen for about 30 years. What if the fascination wasn’t there anymore?
Oh, but it was, Théâtre du Châtelet, still grand and dancey on the Place du Châtelet in Paris, France. The restaurants on the each of the four corners (three?), bustling as always. Too rainy for most of the sidewalk tables, but the interiors were packed with happy theatergoers, scents of coffee and fries (French fries, one imagines) wafting through the noisy air, and the waiters, harried and abrupt, as is expected of French waiters. It could be 1980s. The theatre looked the same, didn’t it? Teresa took pictures of me. I didn’t look the same. The performance was perfect with fine dancers, moody optics for a rainy night in Paris, and Leonard Cohen’s gravelly voice and cynically romantic lyrics filling the imposing space—and my eager eyes and ears and heart.
Then something so strange happened. As the performance went on, I’ll swear I had what is as close to an out-of-body experience as I’ve ever had (except for that time with measles and high fever, but that’s another story). For half an hour or so, both before, during, and after we left the theater, I was another me, a late 80s me who would have been sitting there, watching dance, and then walking back to my nearby hotel in the rain—to nibble on madeleines and ponder the work just witnessed. This much-aged me, standing, right here and now, on the Place du Châtelet on a damp 2024 evening, could not bear to leave that Marj. How could I stay for just a little while longer?
So many events, emotions, memories, things to experience and/or re-experience with not so very much time remaining. I was mourning everything past, and desperate to will it all back somehow. Teresa was thoughtful and quiet, allowing me a little time to return to the present.
And the present was an amazing place to be, that night in that city. With Teresa, dance and talk and … Paris. How astoundingly fortunate I am.
DANCE ME TO the past though…just once in a while, if you please. A bit of rainy romanticism is good for old souls.
In 1984, I discovered Paris. That was when my best friend Sue and I flew off to that glamorous destination for the first time. My first trip to Europe. And it pretty much was love at first sight. I would go regularly for a few years, to venues all over France, but mostly in Paris. I was learning my new profession of “presenting” artists, in my case, mostly contemporary dance and theater.
It was professional, personal, emotional discovery-time. I had been getting to know the American world of contemporary dance gradually, but fairly deeply. Then as my work with the City of Albuquerque and the KiMo Theater grew, my new smart and sophisticated dance friends introduced me to French Contemporary Dance, from which I’ve never recovered. I loved it, finding so much difference from dance back in the States. Full evenings of a single piece. Less fun/more content. Much of it dance-theatre, seeming to incorporate what I was learning about Paris, about France into the work in a more historic and cultural, and diverse way than what usually happened back home, at least that’s the way it appeared to me, a novice in the field. France spent a lot of money on, and took a great deal of pride in, their contemporary arts, and it showed in audience size and enthusiasm.
I remember the performance venues, wherever I was in the country, being excellent, but nothing was quite like Paris’ Théâtre du Châtelet to me—because it was a grand building in the center of the city, devoted to dance. Right across the square from théâtre de la ville and smack dab on the River Seine, surrounded by cafes. I usually stayed in a lovely, but fairly basic, hotel nearby. Heaven to the new kid on the block.
So, there I was in a world as different from Northome, Minnesota or, for that matter, Albuquerque, New Mexico as it could be. I really was in love with it all: the fascinating American friends involved, and those brilliantly worldly and wordy and talented French artists, managers, promoters, and aficionados. And, again, that city. OMG, that city. The endless café au lait et vin at sidewalk cafes, the Seine moseying along through the city, so many trees and gardens and museums and theaters and people speaking the language of romance. Paris. You know how it is, all of a sudden, you are part of something that’s bigger and better and smarter and prettier than you imagined—so that must mean you’re all of those things too. Right?
Everyday-me lived in Albuquerque and programmed the KiMo Theater until I didn’t. I traveled some more and eventually began a new dance-life at the North Fourth Art Center, but the French focus and the visits to the Paris of dance ended, as my focus turned toward the continent of Africa. In 2008, granddaughter Teresa and I visited Paris for her high school graduation present. It was lovely, with the magic all being focused on Teresa’s first glimpse of my dream city. In a few years, dance would drift out of my life. I traveled some more. I got old. I traveled some less.
Then September 2024 rolled around and a chance for a week back in Paris with Teresa came along. And, as you’ve seen in previous posts, Paris was still there in all its glory—at least in my eyes.
I’ve tried to accurately share that evening in Paris from a few weeks ago, so like many evenings in Paris in the 80s and early 90s? Rain, yes, rain. Soft jazz in cafes where we enjoy a le vin, before or after another dazzling dance performance. The mood, the younger me, anticipatory—a new dance company. Even more, a different me—it must be the worldly, clever, articulate me that’s never present back in the US! (Okay, okay, so often in Paris, I worried about money; I clumsily participated in meetings, the topic of which I was somewhat ignorant; I was uncomfortable in a bad hotel; but, nevertheless, always in love with Paris.)
Writing this Paris blurb on a melancholy (because of the persistent sun, probably) December day in Albuquerque. Creating a mood to take me back to that Paris evening last month: Curtains almost fully drawn; a thunder and lightning video playing on YouTube (tv) in the living room; a jazz-in-the-rain video playing on my laptop; Leonard Cohen sings his cynical poetry of love from my phone. There’s a cup of instant coffee nearby. I have a black shirt on and a Simone de Beauvior headband. A baguette and French butter (Whole Foods!) for later. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Marjorie (which sounds so much better in French, oh pour l’amour du ciel), get a grip. What happened that evening, that you were so determined to tell us about at the beginning of this post?
Well, for a moment there, I danced me to the past….
