A Night at the Théâtre

Though there are many theatres in Toulouse and spectacles are well publicized, I was not motivated to track one down and buy a ticket until I saw a poster for Paroles Gelées, a stage adaptation of the works of François Rabelais playing at the Théâtre Nationale de Toulouse. You may be waiting for the rest of the information I had about this play that made it leap out as something I could not miss, but for me that was enough: you see, I spent my last semester of college working on an independent study, the subject of which was one of Rabelais's works. I was already familiar, nay enamored with Rabelais's imagination, corporal frankness, and word-level humor. So when I, amateur Rabelais scholar and lover of words, saw that a theatre in downtown Toulouse happened to be staging what they announced to be a "theatrical adventure" based on that author and called "Frozen Words," I thought I had finally found the reason for my coming to France.

I may have exaggerated in the over-excited state the poster inspired, but the sentiment was rekindled as I watched the opening of the spectacle. The director, Jean Bellorini, adapted the series of novels by extracting the central adventure and having the cast narrate it while acting out key scenes. The narrative moved the story along, but by inserting comic conversations among the characters and repetitive monologues, Bellorini managed to preserve Rabelais's light-hearted style and habit of going into absurdly colorful and precise detail.

The set design also helped to preserve Rabelais's lexical opulence by reflecting the referential abundance with an abundance of color, light, and movement. For example, in the beginning of the play when one character invited the others to a feast, the black curtain lifted to reveal a collection of women in colorful dresses and rain boots playing miss-matched accordions on top of a table, which stood in about three inches of water. The water covered the whole stage within a large sandbox-like container and turned the stage into a moving mirror of the copper-colored and blue lighting. A man in a kilt danced sensuously as he listed off foodstuffs that might have laden a dining table.

Bellorini even did a good job of preserving Rabelais's language. He represented the difficulty every reader of Rabelais has in wrangling the antiquated and liberal prose by devoting a character to translation and interpretation, like a Rabelais expert, who explained words that Rabelais made up and who gave information as needed about the context the play was written in. Because the other characters hopped in and out, sometimes a part of the action and sometimes narrating the action, the translator figure was a natural addition. He interacted with the other characters and the audience with ease and humor.

To my frustration, my brain could only absorb the French words for about two-thirds of the performance, and after two and a half hours I was confused and tired. I watched the characters arrive in the land of frozen words with very little intellectual energy left to understand how the words got there or why they were frozen. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and only wished I could see it a second time.

Foix and California

The similarities between France and California come up often in conversation. People note that both have a gently warm and dry climate, and then that both regions produce wine. They remark that San Francisco is a very European city (what they mean by this is not always clear, but I think they're pointing to the liberal political views and the appreciation of good food). This link may be true theoretically, but Toulouse has never particularly resembled my birth state in my eyes. In practice, the linguistic difference is pretty significant. So is the lack of family and old friends. The geographical differences, though slight perhaps on the scale of possible landscapes over the Earth, are still jarring to me. Toulouse is far from the ocean - there is no cool cloud layer in the morning, no hint of salt in the air, no watery vistas. There is no threat of earthquakes here, so, far from avoiding brick as a potentially hazardous building material, the people of Toulouse use brick so much it has become a point of pride. And compared to the rises of the Oakland hills, Toulouse is totally flat.

The lack of hills in my immediate context has been getting to me, so I decided to take the train to the little town of Foix (pronounced "Fwa") for the afternoon. Foix is situated at the base of the Pyrénée mountains, so I was prepared for cold with three sweaters, but I was lucky: it was sunny out, almost warm even. Perfect weather for a hike. I identified a trailhead using a map of the village posted by the train station and started walking. And I found something I wasn't expecting: the longer I walked, the more I felt at home. The path was a steep climb -- a good beginning for my hill-deprived legs -- through a wood of oak trees. As I got higher I could look across the valley where the town is situated to a display of other hills, and the mountains behind them. Near the top I passed grassy pastures where cows might graze. The act of hiking itself contributed to the feeling that I had somehow closed the gap to home, since when I'm at home I hike the hills frequently with my family or alone. It seemed strange that not only was the highway below me not I-5 or 101, I didn't even know what combination of letters and numbers might designate it as a highway.

I didn't come to France looking for California, and I didn't find it. But finding a familiar landscape was comforting -- my eyes, which grew up expecting to see the world arranged in a certain way, sighed with relief. Though it's exciting to see for myself that the world is not all arrayed in the same way, and though I've gotten used to the brick-lined streets that just won't descend, my eyes are still Californian eyes.

Christmas Magic European Style

I had never heard of a Christmas market before I was in Nantes studying during the month of December. At that time, two years ago, I was very surprised to see rows upon rows of little wooden cabins materialize in two of Nantes's biggest squares and fill with toys, jewelry, colored lamps and scarves, dried fruit, mulled wine, sausage, and pretzels. But upon returning to Europe, I see that such a public collection of holiday festivity is the standard approach to winter: during my travels in the end of December I witnessed Christmas markets (or "les marchés de noël") in Toulouse, Luxembourg, Wiesbaden (in Germany), and London. Though they shared enough characteristics to safely huddle together in the same category of event, I'm glad to have seen so many because they are by no means the same.

Toulouse's market was only one step in a whole slew of Christmas festivities. In addition to the enormous light display over the hut village, the passage through the capitol building (passage Henri IV) had transformed into a carnival complete with a display of a gypsy camp and posters for attractions such as a magician professor who can make demons appear. On the other side of the passage a temporary indoor theatre had been set up where a fairy-tale spectacle took place every hour all afternoon the two Saturdays before Christmas. I missed the spectacle, unfortunately, but I did get a look at two displays on either side of the theatre, both tacky yet enchanting. The first one showed water and earth fairies frozen in various positions upon their branches. The second showed miniature geese arranged in human attitudes in winter scenes, like a camp amid a snowy forest and an ice cavern with little glittering icicles. I also caught a performance of three of La Fontaine's fables in shadow puppets with musical accompaniment. Pictures with Santa, personalized hats made out of junk, face painting, and random sightings of brass musicians on bicycles were also available.

I had the most time to enjoy the Toulouse market, so there I got to experience a whole range of events. But it was by no means a paltry thing to walk through the Christmas market in Luxembourg. Since the tradition originates in the northeastern region of France, Alsace, even the Toulouse market had a northern, mountainous theme; in Luxembourg, which is much closer geographically to Alsace, that theme resonates. In the relatively small market there, I ate authentic sausages (mettwurst and white grillwurscht) and authentic glühwein (warm mulled wine) in a covered area filled with high tables and people talking from underneath their bundles of scarves and hats. I was especially impressed by the stage near the covered area from which a choir and a performer with a guitar took turns serenading the crowd.

In Wiesbaden, Germany, the lights were exceptionally well done. Unlike Toulouse's sheets of lights draped down the front of city hall and over the center of the market like a tunnel, the lights in Wiesbaden were shaped like giant flowers or bunches of leaves sheltering the market stalls. Here, too, there was a stage where schoolchildren sang, and here I enjoyed more glühwein (you can't have too much around Christmas) with a meal of kartoffelpuffer, a delicious potato pancake almost exactly like latkes, and apple sauce. The gorgeous red neo-gothic church of Saint Bonifatius just next to the market square contrasted pleasantly with the blue-roofed retail huts.

Given the Christmas market's continental origin, I was surprised to see that London, too, puts on a market for Christmas. The tradition lost some of its charm over the Channel, I fear: London's market struck me as commercial and touristy. Perhaps that effect is due to the sheer size of the city. In any case, even though the market in Hyde Park was larger than those in Luxembourg or Wiesbaden, it was packed. Its wooden huts were decorated with evergreen garlands and little silver reindeer, but the effect was not pleasant enough to make up for the tight rows of people. Since I had already tried sausage and mulled wine in the heart of sausage country, I did not try the sausage offered there. I did try a different sort of local specialty, however: gummy beer. I didn't believe it at first -- I thought the glass-shaped candy must be soda flavored - but no, it clearly said BEER printed on the candy itself. Sadly, they had not figured out how to make a gummy candy taste like delicious British ale, and I could not even swallow it. I was relieved to get out.

By the time I got back to Toulouse, the Christmas market had been taken down and the lights extinguished. It was back to normal life -- the next magic to illuminate the city will be the coming of spring.