Leaving France (for now)

by the bay in Lorient, France

I am so looking forward to coming home. Home as in Atlanta. As the plane took off I actually smiled: a grin spread across my face every foot - I mean meter - the plane lifted off. 

It's not that I don't like France. Not that at  all. It's that, to live in a foreign culture, well, it's foreign. I may be a body in a foreign culture, but living in another culture is like having a foreign body inside of you. Like a splinter that breaks off, and the skin grows over it, and you experience just the slightest infection as your body pushes it out.

Incidentally, my horoscope told me the whole month of July that I would either accept the foreign body happily, or move into my decidedly foreign future after all, kicking and screaming all the way. Which means, I guess, that I have a foreign future, of some sort.

Finally I speak French with a modicum of dignity, though I am certainly still all but illiterate here. It's not my 2002 Nokia that's the real problem with me texting you back, it's that I can't actually write very much French. I speak as I hear and I write as I see. Like a three year old. 

And here I'd like to pause to give a shout out to all the immigrants. Americans are fond of saying "We're all immigrants," but unless you learned to speak English by watching Fox News, unless every blessed moment of relief - the kind of relief you feel when you understand and are understood - which often comes from having heard and remembered a single phrase - well, you are not an immigrant. You are not migrant at all, not in a cultural sense. You are comfortable where you are, and that, in itself, is a privilege. It is something I am looking forward to feeling again. 

On the Edge

So I spent four days in one place for once. One place as in, the same spot on the same beach. On the same towel. Ringing bells! It's Turner's first swimsuit season! What do you think?

Cabana Boy

I spent hours per day on the side of this water - that's the Mediterranean Sea,  on the Capd'Antibes just across from Monaco. So fancy. I felt like a real live actor. There was even a cabana boy who brought me drinks and food. Paradise. 

Cap d'Antibes, France

And then something kind of incredible happened. 

Habitually, I visit the sea for as long at night as I do by day. Some hours in between for dinner, you understand. Except by day I lie down at the edge, and by night I just sit. And at night I am hypnotized by the sounds, whereas by day I am hypnotized by the view. 

But not this time. This time, as I gave in to the sound of the water lapping the shore, suddenly I got a sense of perspective through my eyes. I got the sense that I sat at the edge of a gigantic canyon. I could see the sand slope away from where I sat to the lip of its first drop down, to the place where the water turned from turquoise to navy blue, past the boulders and the seaweed patches.

But that wasn't what felt incredible. All of the sudden I felt split between Antibes and Silver...somthing National Park outside of Portland, Oregon. I can't believe I can't remember the name. But that's how things go when you're dematerializing: you don't even hold on to all the memories. and you can feel exactly the same in one place as you do in another despite their obvious oppositions.

I visited this National Park as an activity in the summer camp for grownups I got to go to when I was an Artistic Director. The place felt...Jurassic.  The most incredible foliage: gigantic leaves, full-on carpets of moss like Berber, trees laid down a hundred years ago but still full with the wetness of everything.

Silver Falls National Park, Oregon

This incredible waterfall fell over what felt like either the socket of an ancient eye or the inside of a prehistoric vulva. You walked a full minute from one side to the other, through a deep zenith where you could sit and stare at the water falling down. At some point in time that place was once a gorgeous sea. Maybe a lake. Because when you sit at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, you realize that the Great Lake above Chicago is really just a Minor Ocean like this one, and that we call it a Lake to feel more in control of the vastness of our landscape.

Cap d'Antibes, France

I don't know what I'm going to do the next time I sit beside the Atlantic. I might lose my mind at the vastness of this planet. I really might. 

I have heretofore watched oceans like paintings laid flat out in front of me: the beauty of boats in the foreground or the gorgeous sunset on the horizon. I have heard that there are depths, but I never go boating and I do not like to swim. (At least until now. Well see how that goes now that I can swim the way I always intended to.) This night I was led to understand really what they mean when they say things are deep: holding more than you can imagine, and certainly more than you could ever see. I keep fooling myself into believing that life is as simple as I understand it. Then I am shown otherwise.

Festival d'Avignon

I find myself at the center of a city given over to spectacle in the biggest theater festival in Europe. Every summer for 66 years now Avignon opens its ancient churches and castles and its streets to every kind of performance one could imagine. Actors stream over the cobblestones playing instruments and singing, handing out fliers and carrying signs. It’s something they must do: though I perform in 1 of 15 mainstage shows over 1200 other events fringe us. What a brilliant audience building strategy: with over 1200 casts, that’s a lot of friends and family, enough to more than triple the population of this town.

my walk to work

The town itself, designed by Romans, feels like it was designed by a theatrical architect. Every day I find a new alleyway to snake my way to rehearsal, every day I arrive at some church some arch some bridge, hell even some falling down wall that for centuries and now takes its own stage under the sky. They invite us in to perform. Imagine acting in some modern work at La Palais des Papes, where the French popes held court - same courtyard, same stage. The thousands of performances - and I mean the performances that landed people in history too - under your feet, your voice echoing off the same walls your feet touching theirs your voice landing where theirs once played. 

Palais du Papes, Avignon

I perform in the courtyard of a junior college, however, un nouveau lieu people keep saying, not the traditional ancient places. Because my director is an outsider, because the entire cast we are all outsiders, because the text we play concerns itself with outsiders, we play outside of all this tradition. But still inside this walled city, ancient sandstone carved in a ring like the casement of a giant theater in itself.

La Faculte in La Cour Lycee Mistral photo by Alain Fonteray

The shows that take place outdoors begin at 10pm, once the sun has fully set so the lights can shine and so the air feels cool enough to sit and take in a show. They take pleasure in their settings, the actors, the high walls of the Cour du Catedral St. Joseph’s arched windows become the architecture of L’Academie Français for a play about the Nouveau Roman movement (only the French would sell out a 4 hour play about an obscure moment in the history of their literature). The stage lays and the audience soars in a steep rake above the players and in moments when you take a breath you look up and see that even the stars play a part.

Can you see the star? Not the ones on the stage.
Nouveau Roman by Christophe Honore, Cour du Catedral St. Joseph