The Performance

 

 

August 30th, 2008
A couple of weeks ago, following our visit to the Cinque Terre, I had confided to a few folks that I was questioning our choice of Alessandria for our year “sabbatical.” Citing the fact that I had never before lived anywhere “landlocked,” I bemoaned how much I missed being near water and why oh why didn’t we choose to live in a more beautiful place, preferably with an ocean view and lots of flowers? (While I was at it, I also should have whined about not having a villa…) Rachel pointed out my tendency to think the “grass is always greener” elsewhere and asked if I really would have wanted to be around so many tourists for half of the year and that there isn’t much else to do there except look at the ocean. I am nothing if not stubborn when I am in a “mood” so I didn’t respond, stayed disgruntled, made plans for a 3 day ocean visit in September and finally my 48 hour “bug” passed. I was once again happy to be here.

I’m a city girl at heart. The day after I graduated from high school my friend Jean and I moved to Boston- to get away not only from our parents but from what I felt was such a sterile, white and culturally barren environment. We may have been only an hour away from New York City but to me it may as well have been Ohio. So having lived in Boston and Seattle, and loving London, Paris, Rome and New York, did I really think I’d be happy spending a year in a small village by the water? Well yes and no- it is Italy after all and it’s not all that far by train to get to a big city…but I can get easily bored and I love art and architecture… so then you might ask why not Rome or Florence or Venice? 2 reasons I guess- high rents and tourists. In our sweet town of Alessandria we still have not heard anyone speaking English on the streets and even at museums and other “cultural events” no one speaks English- which is surprising on one hand (and only occasionally frustrating) but most delightful on the other. And in our fair city, there are museums and music festivals (such as the recently concluded every Thursday night Summer Blues festival) and some exceptional art exhibits. The number of bookstores will be the subject of another blog someday-obviously my other passion.

We are avid collectors of all the tourist brochures that Alessandria has to offer and one that we have admired all summer is the “Shapes of Time,” not because we can read the Italian (we can’t) but because it was so nicely done (see photo). As a matter of fact we have been so smitten with the brochure and with the billboard posters that we failed to pay attention to the fact that this extraordinary multi-site photography and video exhibition that opened in June was scheduled to end August 31st, THIS Sunday. (see www.biennalealessandria.it) In other words, we have been scrambling to see the Shapes of Time only in the nick of time. (No small feat as the hours have been limited, for example, Tues. and Thursdays only 16-19 or Friday- Sunday 16-19 or Sat and Sun. only 15-17.) And while in the last 10 weeks we have become much better at navigating the streets of Alessandria, we now know even more of the city from tracking down all the different exhibit spaces. These venues alone have been an architectural treat. (middle photo is the outside of one such space)

The photography and video installations have been extremely interesting, all with the broadly interpreted theme of time. Tonight we will return to the Cittadella (fist photo)to see the remainder of what we didn’t finish last night. We hadn’t intended to see the exhibit last night but the performance we had gone to see was delayed by an hour (interesting in and of itself- the delay, I mean, when a number of folks had arrived on time just to mill about in the dark parking lot with the haunted abandoned military buildings to keep them company). We opted to stroll the grounds and discovered the largest “Shapes of Time” exhibit thus far. (One that should have closed by 19 per the brochure but inexplicably, except to the Italians, was staying open til midnight). If only we had known what we would soon witness, we would have stayed where we were instead of hurrying back across the grounds to see “the performance.” But then we wouldn’t have seen the celebrity who was being honored prior to “il spectacolo.”

We should be embarrassed to admit this but we had never heard of Anton Corbijn, often referred to as the “fifth” member of U2, the director of all the U2 and Depeche Mode videos and photographer of both bands, photographer of all their big coffee table books, and probably a zillion other things. Not to mention we hadn’t even gotten to his photographs which were being exhibited in the space we had just wandered away from. But there he was all skinny and practically 7 foot tall with his wife and young son (we think), looking very uncomfortable slouched in his front row seat, as a woman on stage went on and on, and on and on some more (kind of like this blog) about his life and work (we’re pretty sure). Followed by another guy who took forever to shut up about this godlike Anton (we think) and then another guy who appeared with an award (or gift?) for Sir Anton. By the time Anton himself stood on stage, he had forgotten all his Italian (or so he said, probably figuring he could shorten the show by simply pretending) and so said a nice short 3 line thank you speech in English which his (supposed) wife had to spoil by speaking in Italian for 5 more minutes. Show off, I say). Okay so this all took at least an hour on top of the initial one hour delay and now it is 11 pm and all 25 or 30 of us (maybe 30) were breathlessly waiting for the performance of “Ragli” (“Queens” we think but I don’t know why it would end with an “i” the masculine plural- and the word wasn’t even in my Oxford Italian/English dictionary).

Let the performance begin! The lights dim, well except for a big spotlight pointing directly into the audience’s eyes from behind the stage, temporarily blinding us all… Then we see (sort of) 3 women in Venetian gowns and holding masks slowly stepping on to the rather small plexiglass stage. A caped man enters, approaches each of them, seductively takes off his cape revealing his incredibly lithe ballet dancer body, and jetés around them a number of times (he was obviously talented as a dancer but all we could do was worry that he’d fly right off the too small stage). A few minutes later, the spotlight again blinds us while more stuff happens (we would have known what stuff( if we could see) between one of the women and our dancer and then the lights go off. After a few long seconds, someone claps in the front row, so we all clap, wondering if it was already time for an intermission- after all it had only been 10 or 15 minutes, tops. But no, it wasn’t intermission, it was THE END.

And just like our blog readers, we stayed until the bitter end… through the curtain call and another speech. We managed to leave as soon as it was polite to do so (how fortunate you are as readers that I will never know when you give up on my blogs…but in case you hadn’t heard, there could be a “pop quiz” at any time). We exploded with laughter when we were far enough away to not be heard and continued “reliving” all the special seconds of the performance and the hours of our cultural evening all the way across the river, back home.

(& Nikki, be careful what you wish for)