Thursday, April 11, 2012
Besancon

Yesterday Elise took me to La Citadelle, the great fortress built for Louis XIV by Marechal Vauban, the great engineer and builder of France's fortifications. At the time France had newly received the territory of France-Comte from Italy, following its defeat by France at the Battle of Pavia [], Inside there are several offices, attached to the different museums. Elise wants to leave the resume of a young man she wants to help with her friend Gerard, the institution's conservator in residence, responsible for the care of all the museums' holdings.

We approach the museums' entrance booth and Elise asks to speak to Gerard, who is unavailable. She asks for a colleague of his, Marie-Claire who works at the Musee de la Resistance. We find her office and on arrival, she greets us warmly. After a bit of chat, she calls the conservator's number and he answers, telling Elise to come up when she likes. However, Elise asks Marie-Claire whether she would not give us a bit of a tour of the special exhibit, Robes Grises. Marie-Claire says she will give us a brief introduction, and that although the museum will be closing soon, we can return tomorrow.

Robes Grises is dedicated to the efforts of two women, French Resistants,
Jeanette L'Herminier and Germaine Tillion, who were interned in Ravensbruck concentration camp by the Nazis. They passed the time organizing activities for the others to keep up morale: drawing portraits of fellow camp members, writing a play, developing a code to pass the names of the camp's personnel on to fellow Resistees outside the camp. These two women not only survived Ravensbruck, but lived, astonishingly, to one hundred,

Elise and I thank Marie-Claire for the tour and go on to another building in La Citadelle, to visit with Gerard. A slender man in his sixties, he too, greets Elise and me warmly. Elise hands over the resume of her young friend who is seeking a stage, a required internship preliminary to an actual job offer : unfortunately, his experience does not coordinate with the standard requirements for any position that might become available in the conservator's area.

"It's genuinely sad --students are living in penury, looking for stages, if they don't have parents who can afford to pay their expenses", he observes, his voice rising with feeling. "When I was starting out --I had to compete in the examinations-- but today we have two thousand taking the examination for twenty jobs --one percent!-- will have a chance. It's dreadful...In the universities, it's the same. Students who already have their degrees spend a year preparing for either the CAPES or the agregation --two academic contests, which success in establishes a candidate for a teaching job as a spectacular, desirable applicant. If they fail, they lose a year--"

"--And they have to try again", observes Elise.

The route to work in either France's museums or its universities is an uncertain, treacherous one these days, leading many talented young people to abandon the effort entirely in favor of pursuing les professions liberales --medicine or law, for instance.
Gerard regrets he cannot help Elise's protege, but that is the way it is. He and Elise chat a bit more, and we are off.

***

I met Elise on a street in Manhattan, where she was playing the push-button accordion. She was staying with a family on Long Island for two weeks and commuted into town to tour and to make a bit of money busking. She has done many things in her life: she was born in Mulhouse, but went to Besancon for university, where she majored in Biology. She pursued a Masters in Montpellier, but was also keeping goats in the countryside four months a year, during school vacations. She had also become involved in a circus group started up by students, which was successful enough to tour France. She was happily pursuing her studies, her involvement with the circus and spending summers as a shepherd, when the library in Besancon contacted her to ask whether she knew anyone who would be interested in taking an available position to work in the children's section. She was that person, she said, but she would like only to work part-time. The part-time job became her life's work, supplemented in recent years by busking.

Ten years ago, she was treated for breast cancer. At the time she was raising three teenaged boys with her partner, Jean. They have always lived in the old town in Besancon, within sight of La Citadelle, and the river Doubs, which encircles Besancon. Their apartment is an tiny duplex, with the attic containing the two bedrooms and bath, the first floor the kitchen, dining area and toilet. Her boys, Basile, Gaspard and Theo, 31, 27 and 24 years, Basile lives in London, Gaspard in Geneva. Theo, who pursued studies at MIT and CalTech, is now, like his mother, involved in a circus troupe in France. Last year she and Jean married after forty years together: it was necessary for them to obtain rights to each other's pensions when the other died. They had a civil ceremony at Besancon city hall, complete with friends, who threw rice.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

I sorted out my travel plans today, being able to find trains to Avignon, Marseille, Nice, Paris, Hendaye-Irun and Santiago de Compostela, as well as modestly-priced hotels, a great relief. It still being the low season, I thought I could take in Avignon in particular, without the crowds that swarm there in the summer.

After a day spent attending to all this, Elise invited me to visit her tap-dancing class, then to join her and Jean at a dance performance of Display/Copy Only, a dance work for five male dancers being given at a theatre in Besancon.

There was something about watching Elise and her mainly middle-aged compatriots of both sexes go through their paces that evoked what the French call la douceur de la vie, "the sweetness of life". Everyone danced in their street clothes, first without music, to practice the combinations, then, at the end, with. No one was a great dancer, the pace was moderate, rather than quick, but everyone concentrated with great purpose on getting the steps right, yet without losing a sense of humor about it all. Plump and lean, sexagenarian or twenty-something, everyone danced unself-consciously and enjoyed himself.

Display Copy Only was a complicated modern work involving the appropriation of bits of other choreographer's work by the choreographer, who had been permitted to borrow the segments by the original choreographers, ten in all. The title of the complete piece means to challenge the idea of "authorship" in a world where the traditional meaning of copyright is challenged by the ease with which the Internet makes more works more widely available than ever. The choreographer, Joanne Leighton, was also interested in exploring the idea of using works of choreographers who compose their works in collaboration with the dancers, rather than solely.

The dancers, part of the Centre choreographique national de Franche-Comte a Belfort, were professionals of great versatility, as the piece was about two hours long without intermission with only two brief pauses between sections. This meant that with ten choreographers represented in ten pieces, there were few pauses between the end of one choreographer's style and the beginning of another's. Yet all the dancers executed the movements seamlessly. There was little music: in the first part an American rhythm and blues song, followed by a soundscape of electronic music. In the second part a rehearsal of the Mozart Requiem provided the background music, which alternated with comments from a previously taped rehearsal. At one point the "fourth wall" was breached, and two of the dancers sat in the audience, with one of them taking direction from another dancer remaining on stage. The creative process of the choreographer was mimicked by the dancers as they tried out different movements and evaluated their effectiveness. To dance for so long without a break --and so well, was a credit to them all.