Between Spring and Summer 2017

An excellent Tosca performance and an - as ever - inspirational - to say the least - Eifman's ballet, Red Giselle, in Toronto as the home for international avant-garde.

A very fruitful workshop on Plato's Gorgias in UCD (on my side of the ocean, Davis CA, not Dublin).

Now back to finishing business on an accepted piece.

Then a Plato workshop in Paris, in a Europe that gives me delight every time I visit (determined to spend a week in the Louvre this time; last visit was exclusively devoted to Rodin's Museum; and also determined to get back to the French liaisons after summer), and makes me numb whenever I hear about how and into what it is being transformed.

Then Greece and other pieces to finish, and for sure Papadiamantis and perhaps the early and the very last Angelopoulos for a couple of evenings: some among the chosen Greeks for this summer. Ernest Hemingway's language proved to be slightly disappointing, compared to the raised expectations, and so I decided to return to some Greeks, as far as literature breaks are concerned, not because of their being Greek, but because of the familiarity with the joy I take in their language.

Mere parataxis: no time for adding verbs, no time for formulating sentences, at least not on this blog; no time or soul to waste on imposing interpretations on the present moments: let the latter complete themselves in due time, a time we cannot force to emerge according to our whims and whose emergence we are bound not to miss. The Ascension of Christ is about to be welcomed in our time progression.

PS: It is only after the performances at the COC that I listen to Maria Callas. The same again with Tosca. Such an abysmal fragility in this superb voice; so much lurking egocentrism at the same time: or, is that combination surprising?



Olga Spessivtseva, the extraordinary Russian ballerina, is the focus of Eifman's Red Giselle.



Vermeer was travelling and absent from Louvre, but there was so much compensation for that; for instance, dozens of Delacroix, here his Souliotisses and his (pretty small) Pietà: plenty of an opportunity to admire and study his greatness in painting a bunch of human bodies as if woven together into a whole. I know no one but Rubens and him who are so successful in this undertaking.


If Sirens were in need of a particular place to be in so as to exist, this could be it.