Life can seem grim lately: radical nostalgia-ism rampant in the homeland, pestilence sweeping the globe, war in Europe, betrayal everywhere. There is nothing especially odd about these particular grimnesses, but the, somehow Victorian, alt.-reality script does give it all a certain short-hair bristling, pre-episode strangeness.
There are demands, for example, that a person’s uterus status restrict that person’s right to travel. A Tzar of All the Russias, formerly an agent of a notorious communist secret police service, bombards the gates of united Europe to the applause of obscure zealots hosted by nameless billionaires. Ambitious villains, cheek by jowl with messianic demagogues, plot overthrows of otherwise happy unions.
I’ve been enjoying myself pretty well, though. Despite the alt. script, the real world of good, old, solid conundrums and sweet embrace flickers on, like General Hospital on dead Grandma Tracy’s TV.
Just the other day, for instance, poor and inflation-rattled as I am supposed to be, I had the pleasure of a ristretto coffee made from beans plucked from a wild aboriginal coffee tree. Coffee, apparently, is native to a remote mountain province of Ethiopia, someplace near where Lucy woke. And the experience of getting the ristretto was as charming and enjoyable as drinking it was interesting and pleasurable.
The wild beans are bought by Early Bird, a little stand inside the Marché Beauvau on Place d’Aligre, the venture of a pleasant Franco-Irish couple. Together they roast the beans then sell them, and many other types of coffee, besides, to the public. They also sell cups of coffee to market-goers; that’s how I got the ristretto and the beans, going to the market on Sunday morning.
The bluff, well-made Irish fella took my order. Composed and busy behind a sleek, complicated-looking machine, the French woman drew my ristretto. The fella served me as I stood. I went out front and sat on an as-you-please bench set along the front window and threw the ristretto back. That done, I went and asked the fella to recommend me a coffee. He sold me on the wild beans, quite pricey. But no blarney.
Those wild aboriginal beans from provincial Ethiopia deliver all the savor and lyric he said they would.
Speaking of the world’s sweet embrace … Not long after I drank that ristretto and got those aboriginal beans, I had the pleasure to experience a Visite danséechoreographed around the famous conundrum of a set of six medieval (+/- 1500 CE) tapestries called La Dame à la licorne (“The Lady with the Unicorn”). The Visite, the brainchild of choreographer and dancer Aurélie Gandit and her troupe cie La Brèche, adds dance to the usual mix of fact and informed commentary and took place this past June in the recently renovated Hôtel de Cluny, Paris’ museum of medieval art.
The Visite was an intellectual and esthetic experience inside an innocent adventure, like my ristretto, a pleasure in the experience of it and enjoyable in the getting to it.
Aurelie Gandin led our group through the halls and stairs of the museum and, finally, into the rather small, rectangular room where the tapestries hang.
It is cold. The light is buttery. We gather in a clump, toward the approximate center.
The tapestries dominate the space. Woven of silk and wool, they make the air smell strongly of old silk. Two hang at the top of the room, two more on the left-hand wall, and, 180° behind us, a fifth hangs at the bottom of the room. A sixth, labeled Mon seul desir, occupies the wall to our right.
We all look around. Every figure in every tapestry is distinct, clear. But not bright. The hoto lies. The “washed” colors are both fill and line. Weave doesn’t bleed, even over 500 years. Each tapestry features La Dame at its center. This noble She is framed by a lion to her right and la licorne to her left. In five of the tapestries, the visual scene points one of the five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. The sixth tapestry figures La Damein front of an open tent. “Mon seul desir” is stitched over the opening of the tent. La Dame lightly caresses a casket of jewels held out by a maid-servant.
People who have thought about La Dame à la licorne agree that whether you read the six tapestries as a single narrative or as a series of meditations or think of them singly, Mon seul desir is stuffed with possible senses and subtly compelling combinations of senses: “My true desire? My only hope? My unique wish? My sole aspiration?”
Aurélie Gandin suggests that we can take the five physical senses represented around us as a way to understand Mon seul desir, as a sixth sense – the “heart”: mon seul desir, my true desire, my only hope, my unique wish, my sole aspiration.
Placing herself toward the top of the room, Gandin asks us all to close our eyes and relax.
I feel as if a séance with La Dame will start.
When Gandin asks us to open our eyes again, she is using careful hand movements to invite us to look at the tapestry just in front of us, at the top of the room.
As she will to the end of the Visite, Gandin points the detail of the visual narrative that gives a tapestry its name. She comments iconographic details.
She dances unhurriedly but briefly and segues into the next commentary on the tapestry to her left.
Gandin’s dances are fluid, sometimes focused in her upper body and hands, sometimes on her lower body, pelvis, legs and feet – her and her heaven and earth.
Gandin keeps her dance within the visual frame of the tapestry that she has commented, that we are observing. Is this to make sure we imprint the movement into our regard?
I have no sense that she’s “dancing the story”. Her dance strikes me as her being her sensibility and experience of the tapestry as artefact, as story and as a meaning or meanings.
About a half an hour later, Mon seul desir danced, the Visite at its end, I look around at the tapestries.
I see a lot of the Tarot in La Dame à la licorne.
As for the 22 arcana of the Tarot, La Dame appears to me to be set into a very deliberated selection of iconographic elements. Accepting the deliberateness lets me see that the images and arrangements of image are less like a story and more like the precise words and word order of an incantation.
And, as an incantation, La Dame à la Licorne does as the Tarot does. First, it points two subjects – the image and its viewer. Then, where only the subject can see, it opens on to the “magic world” where desire, hope, wish and aspiration reign; beggars there can ride. Finally, as with the Tarot, the world La Dame opens onto is transition, becoming, movement.
By adding movement – I am thinking of dance here as intention delivering a unique but subtly shaping blow to movement – Aurélie Gandin adds spectrum both to the esthetic pleasure and intellectual experience La Dame à la Licorne. The result of the addition is not so much the particular choreography or the performance or the quality of dance. Rather, in mirroring the movement that La Dame points to, it is the enabler of a fuller understanding of what’s there. Like the first dance at a wedding, a Visite dansée enables other dance, other pleasures.
Put a Visite dansée (and also La Dame à la licorne) on your conundrums-and-sweet-embrace bucket list.
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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
