It is crying in my heart
 like it rains on the town.

Il pleure dans mon cœur
Comme il pleut sur la ville.
Quelle est cette langueur                                                                                              Qui pénètre mon cœur ?                                                                                                                                                  Verlaine                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Where are my dear Verlaine and my idol Rimbaud...   
Yes, it is raining in my heart too…. I miss to be in a theater; I miss the smell of the old sets, I miss the darkness, I miss the ghosts of all the great singers, I miss the silent laughs and the lo

ries. It was the only place where we all could be ourselves, protected by the anonymity, the character, the disguise...We could live an entire destiny in a few hours, and travel through many adventures, many lives thanks to the words and the music of others...

Then for me it stopped abruptly… and these days, with the pandemic we all live a life that we had not imagined possible, and we try to invent solutions or at least new ways to CONTINUE TO BE…How can we try to find new depth in ourselves since for most of us we are almost isolated? Is there a better possible improvement that to try new things created by new encounters, new contacts, new ways of thinking brought by others? Be aware of what others do, bring, create, and grow from it, to progress, to mature... THAT WAS A GREAT CHOICE OF LIFE BUT TODAY WE ARE FORBIDDEN TO DO THAT, we spend most of our time alone or on the phone, facetime, zoom, and we are just confined to social medias where we believe we are free to say anything we want about anybody. Everybody believes he can say anything but at the same time all ideas are denied as extreme…                                                                          To have different opinions and to exchange ideas is not permitted; just extreme ideas TRY to justify themselves…                                                                                                                                                                              We are becoming people like the careerists, the social climbers, the go-getter of the Bourgeois class in the 19 century Paris, acting from a Balzac novel and believing they could just destroy reputations .........Revolting.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

People have no shame? The most surprising is that I am still asking this question, I had the answer a very long time ago...Shame is an invention of religion, it is not part of our basic psyche, we do not know shame, some are just afraid to be caught or exposed or shown, so they are ashamed.... Makes me laugh NO it makes me grin...

What happened to the flowers of the escaping time? What happened to the people of the passing time? Time sometimes seems to destroy everything, even friendship. Will we ever learn where these friends of the past are, or even who they became? Some disappear from our life and we miss them… BUT these days we need all the support possible, all the friends of the past should resurrect and be with us, and we should not accept so fast and so lightly the judgements of the extreme ones.                                                                                                                                         When will we stop dismissing the ones of our beginnings because of the acquired success and sometimes because of opinions on Social medias…                                                                                                                                                                    It is now time to refuse to dismiss the past and on the contrary we should continue to learn from it!                                    

Some of us have the great talent to become a reference to their own truth...They do not know more than anybody, but they are succeeding in making believe that they KNOW...they talk well, they are full of self-importance, they pontificate about the most banal things, they make the obvious become a vision, and since we live in a culture with no culture, MANY are looking for their opinions and follow their ideas…

We should constantly  keep in mind where we come from, who we were, where we went, and what we became, and we cannot fall in the trap of ignoring the ones who were important in our life at one point.
It seems that too many people disappear from our life after a few years, and we miss them most of the time because we believed they were friends... unfortunately some disappeared because they became famous or important or self-important…what a pity to have this kind of attitude, it is really sad, disappointing or even painful to see that human beings can be so low, so ungrateful ...they believe they have reached a level where they no longer need our friendship, they want to ignore the possibility of being thankful for all we did.                                                                                                                                                  How can people forget where they come from, they should learn that to succeed is to be faithful to your friends and not to shut out everything else.

 I do not think I ever forgot my friends or even ignore them because I was lucky and sometimes achieved more than others; I will always continue to be there for them…

We must be loyal in friendship, and even sometimes willing to take risks to help the ones in trouble when times are tough. And these days, times are very difficult for all, so let us be there for them.

It is raining in my heart and It is dark out, I go to the window, nobody in the street...  The pandemic is punishing us, did we really deserve it? What have we done? Where are the dreams of 10,20, 30 years ago of an equal society? we have been struggling for more power, more influence, more knowledge, and more life ...and now we are struggling for  survival and peace of the mind….  Yes, it can be very sad to realize that. 

 I remember when arriving in a rehearsal room to direct a play or an opera…...I was full of joy, desire, apprehension...I felt confident and I had fears, I had to try not to run the other way...                                           Often when I was acting and before the performance arriving to the theater... I was  asking myself: But why do I have to be here, may be a strike of the stage hands will prevent us to perform, may be the theater will be on fire, may be a few colleagues will be sick and we will not have to do it...and then ...THEN...I enter the stage as Mercutio, or Le Cid and I forget everything , I am totally in control or even better I am not me anymore, I just live, full of passion, overjoyed by being another, feeling how much in the audience they listen to me-finally-, how much I can make them cry or laugh, I am the master of the universe...                                                                                                                                                                                         I was always the first one in the rehearsal room...And then talking to the cast: “today we will go thru the score, thru the text and the music…” I had to be careful not to become a teacher in a classroom, not to drawn them with information about the style, the period, the story…   I had to be careful NOT to overwhelm them with what I believed was useful...I had to remember what my great teachers told me...To direct is to put in the right direction , not to micromanage every thought, every move , every gesture...it is to guide artists in the direction of the frame and the picture you have in my mind...Tania Balachova telling me, I was 22   : “You want to be a great director ? Remember the most important...DO NOT impose, make them discover, make them understand the situation, make them understand the emotions, make them understand the relation between characters, make them find in themselves the equivalents, BUT DO NOT IMPOSE, do not make them imitate a feeling, do not feed them like newborn...do not impose mechanical gestures on them.”

YES, IT WAS A GREAT TIME, YES IT WAS BEING ALIVE, YES, I WAS LUCKY TO HAVE THIS LIFE FOR SO MANY YEARS… And now, it is all disappearing, the world is just fighting away, it seems that we are at the end of a culture, yes, the pandemic will at one point BE away and what we call normal life will be back again…But what life will it be?  The pandemic is the culminating and the final point of a sad evolution of what we have known for many generations in the arts and in the everyday life, WILL THE NEW CULTURE BE AS FULFILLING???? I HOPE SO… I DREAM OF IT… BUT….

It is crying in my heart like it rains on the town.