Wuppertal, Antwerp & Paris: October 2019

Wuppertal

Thirty five years ago in the Brooklyn Opera House we saw a dance company, Pina Bausch. Dance does not describe it.  One event was a dancer on a long roped swing on the edge of the stage.  She swung gently at first barely broaching the audience.  Then faster and farther until way out over the audience. It was scary. When the maximum span was reached she stopped her swinging motion and let gravity bring her back to stillness then walked off the stage.

For another event the dancers came onstage like furniture movers carrying a large rolled up carpet.  They unrolled it on stage.  One of them layed down on it.  The others rolled him up like a burrito and carried him off rolled up inside the carpet.

Pina Bausch died in 2009. In 2011 her friend, Wim Wenders, released a documentary about her company based in Wuppertal. In the film her company ventures out into the small community to use public spaces as their stages. And that is where we first saw the Schwebenbahn.  Erected in 1901 in Wuppertal.  It is an elevated electric train.  It runs only east and west on an 8-mile track. Most of the track is over the Wupper River. What is unusual is that the train hangs from an iron arm under the track, like a ski lift.  I cannot explain why, but it was exciting to ride. And the vistas swinging over the river are exhilarating. The whole thing is held up by iron bits similiar to the Eiffel Tower. It is old, yet feels modern. It carries two million people per year.

Wuppertal otherwise is grey and grim. I paid attention to the faces of the local people. They grimace.  Their mouths are in a frown.  I smiled at a few and for a split second their frown turned to smile then immediately back again.



Antwerp, Belgium

Antwerp is easy to love right from the start. People get around on bicycles and slender street cars. The streets curve. Around each bend is an eye catching historic building. It has an appearance of an appreciation of aesthetics. 

The home of Peter Paul Rubens is open for a visit. I expected historic furniture, maybe his desk, bed, easel, and those things were all there, but the rooms were full of paintings. Original paintings. Mostly by Rubens. Some by Anthony van Dyck and Pieter Breugel the Elder. The walls are covered in leather panels embossed with gold. The clocks and china are the finest of their day. He occupied the house from 1608 till his death in 1640.

Another Antwerp building of the same vintage, is the Plantin-Moretus Museum. Christophe Plantin, a commercial Antwerp printer in the 1550s fled Paris when printers began being burned at the stake. He flourished in Antwerp. The business lasted through the 1800s. His sons and their heirs took over the business one after another. When the business ceased the building became their residence. So walking around the building you see the seven old printing presses. Five still work. The two oldest do not; they were built in 1600. The family possessions include 17th-Century tapestries woven from Rubens’ designs. They display the oldest atlases, botanical prints and dictionaries.

The printing museum sits in a sweet small plaza. We sat in a coffee house. I ordered hot chocolote. It arrived in two parts: the hot milk and the dark chocolate bits in a small glass to add in and watch melt. I loved watching the melting chocolate transform the milk. We spent time with nieces. We joined them at a game bar. It was a special pleasure.  The bar has shelves full of boardgames.  For the price of a cappuccino or a beer we sat for a few hours playing games; us senior citizens and our young’uns who value the opportunity to put their phones down.




Paris
25 October 2019

From Antwerp we rode the train two hours south to Paris. While in Antwerp I thought it beautiful in a Parisian way. Once we arrived in Paris the scale of the beauty was grander, it all seemed so much “more”.  Haussmann’s plan still sings with logic, splendor, rhythm, elegance and balance.

On a chilly, rainy, gray Sunday we traveled 15 miles northwest of Paris for lunch at the Auberge Ravoux. The ground floor restaurant has been restored to its 1890 appearance. The menu is old fashioned classic french from that period. 

We begin with pumpkin soup and a terrine of rabbit with lentils on the side. Next we eat t-bone veal steaks and a large small chicken. We each slow sip a single glass of rosé. Last night we stayed up too late and drank too much champagne, bordeaux, Alsatian white, and a Perigord sweet white with our poached salmon, sautéed wild mushrooms, fois gras, oysters, prawns and assorted exotic seafood.

We are all a bit sleepy, but the cold outdoor air wakes us up. After lunch we take a walk up village lanes past a church, through cornfields. They have been harvested to the ground. What remains is a stubble of cut stalks and assorted decayed cobs. Crows caw in the near distance from tree to tree. Eventually we arrive at a cemetery. It is on high ground. The above ground grave sites are mostly bulky with lids and headstones in marble. Two grave markers stand out because they are simple. One belongs to Vincent Van Gogh the other to Theodore Van Gogh. They died at 37 and 34 years old. 

Vincent van Gogh moved from the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence to Auvers-sur-Oise two months before his death. He hoped Dr. Gachet would offer a cure from the noise in his head. Van Gogh took a tiny room for two months in the Auberge Ravoux. He made 70 canvases in two months while the family fed and took care of him till one day he limped in holding his abdomen.  He had a bullet wound. He died two days later.

His paintings in Auvers were of crows and fields of crops and the church and the doctor. While we ate in the Auberge busloads of tourists tromped upstairs through his room. The nails he hung his paintings on are still in the wall. Our own pilgrimage consisted of visiting the tabac across the street. At 11:30 in the morning it was filled with locals. Hellos and hugs and handshakes were exchanged. Children were kissed. The men had small glasses of white wine, pastis, whiskey the women milky cups of cappuccino. All as it might have been in his day. Small town life. The population smaller now than then. We walked around, into and past the church he made famous. Inside, the near collapsing stone arches are propped up with iron. Then up the hill through the wind and drizzle up to the crop fields with the crows and the cawing and finally to the two simple graves: Vincent van Gogh 1853-1890 and Theodore van Gogh 1857-1891.