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ARTS:
FRENCH BIENNALES
Indian
Summer In Lyon
Europe
re-discovers the arts of the Orient while tripping along the silk route
By
S. Kalidas in Lyon
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| A spectacular
kitsch of the Shanghai Song and Dance Ensemble |
Describing
its tumultuous artistic life between the two world wars, Ernest Hemingway
called Paris "a moveable feast". Well the feast, it would seem,
has moved south-east. Far from the Quartiere Latin on the left bank of
the Seine, it is now celebrated between the Rhone and the Saone. With
an effervescent display of dance and the visual arts from around the globe
every two years, Lyon is emerging as the new centre of multi-culturalism.
This relatively small (population 500,000) provincial town plays host
to not one but two seminal international events-the biennales of dance
and of contemporary art. One of the oldest of French cities, Lyon was
the Roman capital of the Gaul region in ancient times. And as there is
little to Lyon apart from its historical memories, its cuisine, the silk
industry and now dance, music and contemporary art, it is an idyllic island
where critics, choreographers and artists get to meet and see each others'
works.
They have
been calling it an Indian summer in Lyon this year. Not necessarily for
the scale of the Indian participation, which was significant if small-sized
and yet to some extent predictable in both the biennales. The simple fact
is that the sun lingered on late into September, bathing the old buildings
and the old cobbled streets of St Jean and the Roman relics at the Fourviere
in a warm ethereal glow. "With weather like this, even the crippling
strike against the rise in petrol prices cannot dull the enthusiasm of
Lyon," says Marie Therese who has moved recently to Lyon from Vienna
to work for adec-the art prices directory-one of the sponsors of the contemporary
art show. For what a Parisian friend referred to as "a small bourgeois
population", the Lyonnaise seem very passionate about the arts. On
any typical day, if there were 2000 people wandering through the 4.5-km-long
walk-through at the art biennale, there were over 3000 witnessing the
spectacular show put up by the Shanghai Song and Dance Ensemble at Fourviere's
ancient Roman theatre overlooking this lovely town and its two rivers.
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