A few weeks ago, I got a phone call from my grandmother\u2019s best friend, whom I\u2019d never met before. She\u2019s French and lives in the United States, but she came back to France to visit her sister in Paris. My grandmother had told her I was in Toulouse, so she called me to ask if I wanted to visit her in Paris over the weekend. She offered to pay for my train ticket and she wanted to take me to the theatre Saturday night. How could I refuse?<\/p>\n
After a six-hour train ride, a walk through an outdoor market and a visit to Sacr\u00e9 Coeur, the Arc du Triomphe and the Champs-Elys\u00e9es, my new \u201caunt\u201d took me to the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre de l\u2019Atelier. The theatre isn\u2019t too far from a bigger, more well-known theatre called the Opera Garnier, which is a sacred temple of art whose majesty lifts the spirit even just with its outside appearance\u2026but I refused to visit it earlier in the day.<\/p>\n
Why? Theaters are my favorite places. The space, the shadows, the silence\u2026all of these qualities bring about unequalled peaceful and magical qualities. But after the end of my artistic career, once I had definitely left these places, entering a theatre became extremely painful. But in Paris, I sat in the second balcony of a small theatre, watching a play called \u201cThe Father\u201d. The play tells the story of an old man who is losing his memory and of how his daughter takes care of him. As the story unfolds, you discover that it\u2019s told from the father\u2019s point of view, as the events do not happen chronologically.<\/p>\n
I was afraid to go to this play because the theatre reminds me of something I miss and also because the play was in French. It\u2019s true that I cried for a moment at the beginning, when the stage first lit up. But afterwards, the story enveloped me and I forgot that it was in French. The words weren\u2019t too difficult, maybe because the magic of the theatre and the universal language of the arts are always comprehensible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few weeks ago, I got a phone call from my grandmother\u2019s best friend, whom I\u2019d never met before. She\u2019s French and lives in the United States, but she came back to France to visit her sister in Paris. My grandmother had told her I was in Toulouse, so she called me to ask if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4846,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[30101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2-la-une-in-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4846"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2045\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}