Penciled in Paris: Le Festival de Nos Vacances Parisiennes

L’ère d’autorité se trouble Lorsque, sans nul motif, on dit De ce midi que notre double Inconscience approfondit

Que, sol des cent iris, son site, Ils savent s’il a bien été, Ne porte pas de nom que cite L’or de la trompette d’Eté.

—(Mallarmé, “Prose pour des Esseintes”)

“Are you in Paris this summer? Do you have a programme? Expos, concerts, theatre, circus, dance, flâneries? You have decided to enter places you have never been? We have too! Paris has put on its summer dress. . . . Its gardens, its squares, its courtyards, its banks, its arenas, are the theatre of an estival flowering that exists nowhere else in the world.” So begins the brochure announcing this year’s summer theatre festival in Paris, July 14 to August 15,1997. “Paris, Quartier d’Eté,” “Paris, Summer Neighborhood.”

Offering a rich array of urban spectacles to the cosmopolitan traveler or to the Parisian estivating in Paris and unable to leave on vacation, the proverbial garden of earthly delights has become a celebration, a veritable feast of cultural pleasures, a fashion ball with Paris as the guest of honor. Mixing garden metaphors, the festival is evocative of a rich cultural heritage of theatre festivities in Paris. Paris, the quintessential site of haute couture and culture; Paris, still shining under an estival sun (king); Paris in a new “summer dress” renewing the figure of a very old calling: Paris is the theatrical capital of a new European acculturation.

This mixing of garden metaphors is politically purposeful (as indeed it was in the past), a project of the French Minister of Culture, paid for by government subsidies but open to the world. Little wonder, then, that for the francophile professor enjoying the well-rehearsed thrills of an American in Paris, my thoughts wander to other gardens, like that of Mallarmé’s “Prose pour des Esseintes” in which hyperbolic flowers become the site of a virtual performance of cultural revelations, but in 1884, over one hundred years ago.

“The Festival of Our Parisian Vacations” invites participation in a communal affair (“We were two, I affirm it!”) and includes a remarkable display of multicultural entertainments in the most unusual of settings. As the brochure enticingly assures, the Place Colette at the center of the Royal Palace, the courtyard of the Sorbonne, the National Banks of Paris, métro stations, parks, museums, and often quiet corners have become theatrical spaces open to the public eye. This is France’s Ministry of Culture dressed in its decentralized European best.

I was fortunate enough to find time away from the dusty environs of national libraries and research centers (notably the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine) to attend quite a few of these urban events. Wonderful performances that situate France on the mainstage of a new theatrum mundi, they also attest to the power of the French culture of the State, what Marc Fumaroli has called, “a modern religion” in France today (L’Etat Culturel). But as a celebration of diversity, American-style, the festival seems somehow at odds with the long history of French theatre festivals its secret corners would unconsciously reveal. It seems curiously at odds, that is, with the topical issues at stake in French politics today that play the socialist, Lionel Jospin, against the neo-conservative, Jacques Chirac.

Many of the spectacles were free and open to the public, among them the concerts of the World Music Series in the Tuilleries, the Beaubourg piazza, the Luxembourg Garden Kiosque. They included: Dan’nida from Guadeloupe; the Whirling Dervishes of Damas, Syria; Kek Lang; Hungarian Gypsies; the Ebony Steelband from Great Britain; Toto la Momposina from Colombia; the U.S. Mass Gospel Choir; Groupes IF/MBDT; Hip Hop urban poetry from France; and a parade featuring the history of (Parisian) “Fashion of the 20th Century.” This somewhat strange and worldly display of either non-verbal or verbally muffled cultural diversity had the uncanny effect of re-placing Paris at the center of the world’s beat, as the brochure promises, but also at the heart of Europe’s cultural...