CULTURE HAS become so eventful in Paris over recent weeks that there
is hardly enough limelight to go round. There was the opening of the new
Pyramid entrance to the Louvre for one. Construction work on the
Bastille Opera is complete and on Friday builders hand over the keys to
director Pierre Berge. The ceremony will be all the more low key as the
opera, due to open on July 13, still has none of the bare necessities --
like an orchestra for example.
The financial black hole represented by the Bastille has thrown
accounts seriously out down the road at the existing opera. Ironically a
technician's strike which wrecked the gala evening there inspired
President Giscard d'Estaing to press ahead with the Bastille. Last month
Europe's leading social glitterati were again deprived of a #300-a-head
gala by a strike or greve as the say here. Une greve? You mean the sort
of thing that happens in public transport? Oui. Quelle horreur!
Industrial relations were again uppermost on Saturday when the corps
de ballet of the opera held a news conference, not the sort of thing a
corps de ballet normally does, to say no-one would be working this week.
They are striking over a Government Bill which aims at imposing
qualifying exams on dance teachers, a sort of Bachelor of Education of
ballet. Opera dancers want the Ministry of Education to let them off
sitting or appraising such exams.
''We don't want to be examined by gym teachers!'' 21-year-old premier
danseur Lionel Delanoe protested and one has to understand. Nevertheless
it seems unfair that serious trouble at the Pompidou Centre, considered
as photogenic in its heyday as any premier danseur, should have been
crowded out of the media by events at the opera. The centre was recently
closed, as thousands of unfortunate tourists discovered, by a strike
which started among security men after lay-offs and spread to all the
staff. The centre employs about 1200 people full-time and 500
part-timers (as against 1200 at the opera) and neither unions nor
management can give a precise figure -- a pretty precise symptom that
all is not well. The good news is, they're back at work. The bad news is
they decided this week on a work-to-rule because none of their demands
has been met.
Since it opened in 1977 the Pompidou Centre designed by a
British-Italian team of architects Piano and Rogers and intended as a
cathedral of culture for the 21st century has become a familiar if still
uncomfortable part of the Paris scenery. President Georges Pompidou who
died in 1974 predicted his project would cause an outcry. Its
multi-coloured pipes, painted according to the function they fulfil in
supplying water, air conditioning or whatever, briefly earned it the
nickname ''the refinery'' though most Parisians just refer to it as
Beaubourg which is the name of the district.
All those pipes are more or less grimy now -- the problem of keeping
the place clean was never really solved. Worse, the centre's very
success has provoked a serious functional crisis on top of which the
staff are complaining that they are underpaid and overworked without
enough money to even begin running the place efficiently.
Making culture available to the largest possible number was part of
the philosophy behind the centre and one which caused a lot of pain to
Paris's artistic establishment more used to reasoning in terms of a
happy few -- them -- than the mass. No-one, however, foresaw how huge
that largest number would get or the distortions it would cause to the
working of the centre.
Designed to accommodate 7000 visitors a day the centre attracts around
25,000, a figure which doubled during Easter weekend. All those people,
nearly eight million a year, make the centre France's most visited site,
way beyond the Eiffel Tower with four million and the Orsay Museum which
is moving up with 3.8 million visitors.
The Pompidou Centre's library is over-run, victim of the quality of
its services and the poor standard of the Sorbonne's libraries --
students prefer Pompidou. On the other hand the contempary music
institute IRCAM run by composer-conductor Pierre Boulez has come under
criticism for being elitist.
Staff complain that former director Jean Maheu was slipshod. They are
unhappier still with their new boss, Helene Ahrweiler, a pal of
President Mitterrand and former Principal of the Sorbonne, whom they say
is both autocratic and inexperienced. You could be forgiven for not
noticing that Paris is European capital of culture this year.
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