Category Archive

Play day – before getting on the plane. ‘Be careful walking across this square. It is the most dangerous place in Rio,’ says the taxi driver as he drops me off. I am furious that he has not taken me to the gates of the ferry station, but instead elects to drop me like bait in a shark infested pool and see if I can survive the waters. ‘Good Luck,’ he shouts. ‘Sorry I no English.’

I am ending my time in Brazil as I began – by going to see yet the art gallery at Niteroy – yet another building by Oscar Niemeyer. It’s across the bay from Rio – at Niteroy – and I decide to take the ferry, to see the city from the water. Rio is beautiful from here – curve after curve of mountain enclosing sea and sky.  It is like nowhere else on earth. And Niemeyer’s building is like no building on earth. Instead, it is a spaceship which has just landed on the lip of a cliff above the ocean, jutting out, with pools of water surrounding its stem and a great sweeping floating pavement up to its front door. It is astonishing – and closed.

My final 3 hours in Brazil are spent – where else – but on Ipanema beach. Watching the world go by. Swimming in the ocean.  When I land in London 18 hours later, the world is dark and grey. There’s no sun. No light. No laughter. But deep seriousness. When I look in the mirror I notice I have a bright red nose. I poke it into the cold winter air.  Christmas Brazillian style. I have returned dressed for the festive season.

Everyone I had met had glazed eyes and sighed when I said I was going to Parathy. Ahhh…Parathy they all said knowingly. You are so lucky.

4 hours later, driving from Rio, the road to Parathi is still riven with rain. Rain, rain everywhere. But even through the rains bars, I can see the beauty of the mountains, the curvature of the islands and the crescent sweeps of beaches. In sunlight it would be breathtaking. In stair rod rain, it is elusive and tantalising. We arrive in Parathi midday  and it is waterlogged. Great rivers whoosh down the colonial streets. We have nothing with us, except for one umbrella and our sandals. That’s it. And the rain, as in everywhere else in Brazil, is extreme. And here in Parathy no one walks the rain the Rio way. There are too many floods to cross..

The meetings which are meant to happen here, don’t happen. The rain seems to have swept everything away with it. So we have impromptu ones instead.

I get back to the hotel that night at 10pm. On the road since 7am, I am dead to the world, dreaming of Parathy during festival time in July, when the trees in the square drip with books hanging on ribbons from the branches.
 

‘If a dark avenging angel swept away all the books of France, France would not exist. If the same angel swept away music, Brazil would not exist.’

So says writer Suzannae Vargas.  She looks like Susan Sontag and carries herself like her too. She wants to change Brazillian culture and increase respect and participation in literature. 11 years ago, she founded the nearest organisation to Arvon I have yet encountered. She is fiercely proud and passionate about what she has achieved: the Estacao das Letras – which teaches creative writing in many genres – form a tiny apple green space in a shopping centre in Rio. It had started in her own house. Now she barely has time to write her own work – she is so busy helping others and raising funds for writing. She is entrepreneurial, smart and passionate – with an administrator who looks like Gisele the Brazillian super model.

When we say goodbye, I feel as we have both spoken the same language. It’s not only that my Portuguese is getting better – I can understand most things now on day 4- - but the heart of what she is doing and the struggles and problems she faces on some level are similar.

Then lunch on a rooftop with the new young literary lion of Brazil. 29 year only Joao Paulo Cuenca, is very, very smart and very funny too. He is also very self possessed and wears the knowledge that he is doing what he was born to do with self confidence and pride. He trained as an Economist, and started working professionally as one. Then got a book published. Now two novels later, and with a weekly column in the popular newspaper O Globo, he is writing full time. He is just finishing his third novel – a love story. He presents me with his books  Corpo Presente and O Dia Mastroianni. Like everything in Brazil, they are wonderfully designed. The graphic design and the cover are impeccable – playful and distinctive, as well as beautiful.  I know that I am going to love what I read between the pages too. I must buy a Portuguese dictionary.

Joao is introducing and interviewing me tonight at the bookshop.  Again, I sense it is going to be the beginning of many conversations which have started on this trip.

Snapshots of Rio life – Rio is full of them. Glances out of cars. Peeks from the walk ways. Stares on the streets.

A girl cycles past with an orange surfboard in one hand her handlebars held in the other…golden cocker spaniels  pull on sparkling jewelled leads….a man with a barbeque in his hand walks along Copacabana beach….sushi on the beach…beer on the beach…buying anything and everything on the beach… and I suddenly realise I am staying right on Ipanema beach…HIS beach…and I remember how  it was one of his Desert Island Discs…how he came to South America on assignment and danced samba, writing to me about sneaking into a private party on a hotel roof and dancing til 5 in the morning…and how now, here I am, on his beach, present in past time, once more hearing his words on the answer machine when he  flew to  Afghanistan…I kept them for a month, spooling them  backwards and forwards like an incantation until he came back safely from the warzone…. the phonecall from Somalia when I heard birds in the background….our amazement that our lives glanced and criss-crossed each other for years but we never met…how  we had both touched down at Tirana airbase during the Kosovo crisis the same day on the same runway…only not to connect…and then this year, I am running down an escalator, late for dinner with two Italian friends, running, running along a day full of portents…finishing  reading my  now then, then now boyfriend’s novel, with its heart-freezing scene of the girl self-encased in cement… ‘Don’t lose your nerve,’ shouts a tramp as I cycle by…then a silver-slick lorry glances past me,  the words Eternity: Cement Set for All Time’ emblazoned on its side… These days…Oh these days and more…. And  then here I am, running, running…down past a girl with blonde hair, a woman with blonde hair and glasses, and then I fall into his eyes and it’s him….him…right here in the wrong country…right now on these moving stairs for  the Piccadilly line…him still and standing…and his wife and his child who both happened after we never happened… and now here I am in this  happening…me running and running and running down down down…moving past him still and there… stilly beside her and her…the they I never met until this moment…right here ….and me  running with time, and along time and  out of time for dinner, for getting where I am going and all this on this moving toothed ladder of time  whilst he stands still, stilly there. There.

The next day I email him.

Was that you on the escalator at Green Park? What are you doing here? On the other side of the world?

Yes. It was me on that  escalator. Why did you not stop? Next time stop. Stop right where you are.

STOP.

It seems right somehow I think of him here and right now. The city where he sambaed. The city whose song he loved. The beat of his heart. The skip of his words. For that moment. Just now.
This. His. Is.

The lecture that evening starts late. ‘We Caracoa always start late’ explains Anna Paulo the British Council’s Rio Project officer now in charge of my itinerary and language confusion with her colleague the bubbly Raquel. ‘We caracoa are always  elegantly late. Never on time. There are too many things to do. Like walk along the beach, drink, stay in the sunshine, or get stuck in the traffic.’

That explains it. I am Caracoa to the soles of my boots – a born Rio girl - even at home. Joao’s introduction is beautiful. He quotes the beginning of a book about how a trapeze artist breaks rules. We discuss about the imagination and personal freedom. At one point, I am so tired, that I pause to listen to the translation of my English into Portuguese every time it is spoken. I obviously think I am in the language labs of a previous meeting that day. This whirling has finally got to me. I explain – and the audience laughs. Ice is always broken when the human being breaks through.

That night a tropical rainstorm strikes and cracks open the sky.. I am eating tuna coated in sesame seeds on the hotel terrace. The rain roars like canon fire on the pavements. Men walk by in bathing trunks nonchantly as if they are going for a stroll in the park. A couple step out, the man carrying a yellow rose in one hand, clasping his girlfriend’s hand in another.  Everyone wears the rain as if it were a second skin.   No pace is quickened. No umbrellas flare up into the liquid night.  No sheltering is snatched.  This just is. This is  Rio. This moment. Here. Now. No other moment exists. It - just  - is. Learn from this. Walk in the rain…Be. Here.

I have a morning unexpectedly free. A meeting has been cancelled. But the free hours  collapse into three minutes. No sooner have I started blogging, than the taxi arrives. Liliane, Malu and I go to the Oktakhe Museum. It is candy striped, like a stick of rock in black and pink, with a helipad like a giant blue lip on the top. It was built to house the collection of Brazil’s most famous woman artist, by her son who also designed the Unique Hotel. The museum is still a family affair – her other son runs the organisation. As we are eating lunch, he stops and talks to Malu.

Then back to the British Council for a meeting, into a taxi and then off to another industrial sponsor of creativity and culture. In Brazil, culture is supported by industry and not the government. Industry gets tax incentives, and cultural centres are built to monumentalise industries support of the arts and social engagement, and action plans for the workers are drawn up, which include creative courses. One worker I met had just gone on the prestigious film course in Cuba.  Workers  have a programme of personal development which engages with culture which many in the UK would envy – though of course, we are only talking about a very tiny proportion of the workers in Brazil, and the elite at that.

I feel in Brazil as if I have stepped through a cultural looking glass world: . Spoken word in Brazil is seen as too populist and reactionary, and  industry funds the arts and culture, not politicians. In the UK, Spoken word is progressive and outreaching, industrial sponsorship has barely begun.

 The people at this latest industrial group I am visiting are as intense and as playful as everyone I have met so far. That’s what I love about South`America. This abundqnt mixture of fun, combined with intellect and passion. 

Again, I have the feeling that I will see the people around the table soon. Brazil will be coming to Arvon – and the other way round too. I make a mental note to make sure that on our booking forms, we ask where people come from next year, and list all the countries.

Then on the plane to Rio. Malu is not coming to Parathi.  Nor is Liliane. My sales team and business manager as I nicknamed them. We say goodbye. Liliane’s eyes go red, she blinks rapidly, saying don’t cry. Then turns away with a flick of her hair and her heel – ever the ex professional model.

Two hours. Three hours pass. The plane is delayed. This is normal at Brazillian airports. They are chaos, whilst preserving outwardly a smart veneer of modernity, ‘I wish they would tell us why. No one ever tells us says a disgruntled fellow Portuguese passenger sitting beside me in the airport lounge of eternity. ‘Best not to know I say. Somehow I suspect the truth is more disturbing than the lack of it. Four months ago a TAM plane crashed at Rio airport.

We touch down at 11pm. I am tired. But even between shuttered eyes, I manage to see the statue of Christ – his arms open to the world as he embraces the city. See Sugar Loaf mountain. The great crescent moon  sweep of the Copacabana beach. Sense the beat of the city even from the British council car, Then sleep. Deep sleep. And dreams of Arvon in Brazil

But just before,  I go into the bathroom to  brush my teeth. Only in  Rio, in the complimentary casket of  shampoo and  hotel toiletries, could you also find  – a condom.

He speaks in gunfire English and  has an accent from Utah. Professor Reynaldo is head of Literature and Linguistics at the Roman Catholic University in Sao Paulo. His teaching staff are committed and loyal. They beam with a missionary zeal to teach.

“We have no money” he says. “There’s pressure on us to have as many students as possible to get money for our university. But we have managed to keep the numbers of students in our language classes down. You can’t teach a language with 100 pupils which we have in our other classes.”

They love the message of Arvon: that by freeing the imagination you can find your way in words and new literature and voices will grow. They want to jump on the first plane and visit our houses, but they can’t afford to  visit us as a group. But Brazil has a culture where everything is paid for in instalments – including air travel. The national airlines allow you to pay off their airfares monthly spread over a year.  There might be individuals who can afford to come because of this, Reynaldo explains, so we will spread the word, but why doesn’t Arvon come here?’

It is a question which comes up time and time again here in Brazil over my 8 days. Arvon is going to open a franchise here in Brazil says Malu firmly. She’s swiftly  become the business brains, and Liliane the saleswoman. Liliane is starting to know my descriptions of Arvon so well, that she can recite it without me ever opening my mouth. We are a  team with a mission: we want to make literature happen even more here and find a way of crossing the gulf of money, geography and tradition. We know we can do it. We see everyone ablaze with the idea.

The car spins us into the courtyard of one of the hundreds of buildings which belong to a private university founded by an American donor. It has 30,000 students and a campus which is like a town in itself. It also has 6 other branches throughout Brazil.

“We have a house in the mountains. That could be a place to work with you.” Arvon in Brazil suddenly becomes an unexpected  possibility.  They love the idea of cooking and eating together too, which is also a surprise I hadn’t reckoned with. In Brazil, even the very poorest household will have a maid who prepares the food. At Munira’s maids had flitted like shadows in the house bearing steaming dishes of chicken curry and pasta. The past is very much present.

A girl with great sweeps of black hair floats on the ceiling. Arms spread wide,  she is a suspended angel, her white gown spread around her like clouds. Look closely and you realise that what seems above is below you, what seems to be visible is invisible. You are looking in a mirror.

Patricia Osses is one of Brazil’s leading young artists. She works mostly with photography but trained as an architect. Not surprisingly, her obsession is space – the way we occupy it and our relationship to it, even when we have left a particular place.

The work I am looking at was made in her grandmother’s house in Santiago in Chile, where she comes from.

I wanted to make the house where I would live for the rest of my life,’ she explains. Then my cousins said – here is your grandmother’s house. Do what you want with it.’  It’s been untouched for 15 years since she died – waiting for this moment for her grandchild to set foot in it again.

The photographs are a collision between past and present. One shows a curtained room, with azure wallpaper and a mound of belongings: a television set, numerous unrelated chairs, books all piled high  – the debris of a life abandoned by the frailty of the flesh. Peer closely into this dark room, and in the curtains by the window you may glimpse a form. It is Patricia  - a ghost in her own presence.

Patricia turns over her portfolio and shows another photograph.

‘This is the last supper’ she explains. It’s the last supper my grandmother ever had.’ Patricia’s family sit, with her father at the head of the table. But what makes this so extraordinary is that it is in the middle of a shop – a general store with wire mesh shelves which reach to the ceilings – replete  with cleaning products and cans of beans and tomatoes – everything a household could need.

The last supper is an intervention in this space – it used to be the dining room in her grandmother’s house but since she died, it was bought and turned into a shop.  Patricia is reclaiming the space for this one last supper. Like everything she does, it is touching and extraordinary – emotionally thought through. No wonder I am so keen to welcome her to an Arvon house next year as part of Artists Links – an innovative ongoing project in which Brazillian and British artists travel to each others countries and engage in each other’s work. Imagination is moving.

The project Patricia wants to do in Britain is  wonderful too: she thinks every house is like a book: It tells many stories and has many pages which you must turn. She became aware of Britain through reading books, like Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. She has mapped in her imagination a country she has never seen, thanks to the pages of the books she has turned. Now she wants to encounter it for real.  She wants to stay in writers’ houses and make work based on these encounters. She shows me a photograph which started this whole idea. It is of the side of a building torn away,. I  can see the traces of where the staircase was, the delineation of walls like tears on the building, the ghosts of where pictures hung and a doorway once was. This is the map of this buildings’ past : its walls are worn inside out.

Patricia has stencilled huge words onto its walls in Portuguese. This is a house which is a book with many thick pages. Turning, turning, turning…I hope she comes to the Hurst and turn the pages of one angry young man into a house of artful destinies. A Brazillian in John Osborne’s house for whom the ceiling knows no bounds.

The underground station disgorges the cities travellers into an open space, which resembles an aircraft hanger. The noise is deafening here. The clatter of activity  is intense.  People are dancing, rehearsing,  writing, clapping, reading,  shouting, workshopping and running here. But what makes it so different from anywhere I have ever been, is that you not only hear it all happening, you can see it all too. Every space – whether it is the theatre, the library, the centre’s administration, the garden, the rehearsal spaces – is open for everyone to see.  The walls are made of glass.  Even a whisper is amplified. It feels astonishing that  you can’t also hear people think. This is the Cultural Centre of Sao Paulo. A glass heart  which beats with imagination in the  depths of the city.

Last month, they held a partnership with the city’s planetarium. Audiences came and were handed telescopes to gaze at the night sky, whilst poetry was read and music played. This  is a place from whom many could learn. It shows how public space can engage  and stimulate cultural activity, and be alive with it. With a new visionary as its director, Martin Grossman, it embraces the urban chaos with an imaginative zeal. It has been called a city in itself – travelling like a ship on a journey.

Have you read Roland Barthe’s ‘How to Live Together’ asks Gui, a visual artist who only started work in the education programme here three weeks ago. ‘It reminds me of the Arvon Foundation. How you have to live together in a retreat like a monk to be truly individual and listen to your soul.’

Everyone here is struck by the Arvon message of imagination freeing you. But how will it translate into this intensely noiseful space? We start a conversation which is still just beginning – and somehow I know it will lead somewhere unexpected, unusual and special.

‘Then on to give another lecture. This time it is a double act about New Writing in the UK,  with Julie Ellen at SESI which is running the Nucleo project. Julie is awe inspiring, the work she has done for the Playwrighting Studio of Scotland in just 3 years is astoundingly  impressive.

The questions we field are  from committed and engaged young drama students . They ask intensely about how theatre can engage with politics and perhaps even replace journalism.
Students come up afterwards, asking more questions.  And then an injection of reality. All the time during this 7 day visit, I am intensely aware that I am seeing a slice of Brazillian life which is so privileged it bears little resemblance at all to what the majority of people in this country experience.  A young student comes up to me. ‘I don’t have a question for you. I just have this.’ He thrusts a sheaf of papers in my hand. ‘This is what life is really like in Brazil. This is how my son really lives. It’s written in Portuguese which is our language. Read it and see.’

There is one other moment in my 7 day trip when the same reality cuts through the verneer. In the converging lanes of traffic at the entrance to Sao Paulo airport, a young girl stands, hand on hip. She has long black  hair lank with neglect, a lost face, and is dressed like a school girl in a black skirt and top, with shoes.  There is no light in her eyes: they  are deep black caves. All that is left of this 16 year old girl is a body stranded yet still standing in the tides of traffic -  a girl who has nothing to live for, except for the  car door which will be opened to let her in.

And it all begins now…the hard work that is!

Sammy the British Council driver comes to pick Julie and I up and sweep us off the British Council building. He is immaculate , dressed in his Italian suit and warm smile. But underneath there is a steelyness which is awe inspiring. He has three daughters and each one has been planned to be born 5 years apart so he can spread out the costs of sending them all to University. He is a man of resolute focus and infinite plans.

The British Council is housed in the Cultura Inglesa – a huge white modern building of glass and white steel, built swiftly in 12 months and financed by business. Money talks in Sao Paulo, and the architecture as ever is stunning, aglow with water and light. Space is a dimension in Brazil which never gets ignored. No wonder this country boasts great footballers, architects, designers and performance artists. Space is the canvas they all possess and play with in a country which could enfold Europe with in it almost  three times over.

We meet the Director of Operations, Stephen Rimmer, with his immaculate zen garden on his desk; Liliane who I have met in London months before, who looks like the model she once was, and has quickness which is lightning-bright; Malu who is the warmest  and most delicate person on the planet with a dancer’s precision; and Pedro who met his Brazillian wife on the internet and runs the Nucleo project for finding and encouraging new playwrighting in Brazil. They are all special, committed and exuberantly playful people.

Then the whirl of meetings begin –  first with the Nucleo project funders, then with FLIP  - the international literature festival at Parathy – the ensuing endless sequence of meetings interrupted by lunch with Munira Mutran who is the academic leader of the Nucleo project. She is indisputably elegant and mannered,  an ex British Council scholar who teaches at the University of Sao Paulo – one of the most prestigious in Brazil. Her home is spacious, designed by her engineer husband and built with love over time: ivy lacing the wall; inner courtyards, a beautiful garden room. But these walls contain the unexpected too : 100 ornamental  cats of every shape and size adorning her rooms behind glass cases. She says she has 3 real siamese ones, but we never see them. we only spot a dog called Chase, who seems determined to play ball and catch-me-as-catch-can.  And in the middle of lunch, surreally I find myself talking about James Joyce and WB Yeats. When I leave, Munira presents me with the Journal of Brazillian-Irish studies which she edits.

During the many meetings which stud the day, I am constantly struck by the enthusiasm  to embrace creative writing:.there is a hunger and passion for it. There is also a universal disbelief that Arvon can courses which cover 24 different genres of creative writing. How can there be so many forms?  Literature is such a young and restricted culture here. Brazil may have its great dead authors – like Clarice Lispector and Jorge Amado -  but living authors tend to only sell 3000 books if they sell well.  This is partly explained by the extremely low literacy rate and the extreme poverty. But there are other explanations too. As Guilheme from the Cultural Institute of Sao Paulo explains, ‘the Spanish look down on us and say we have no literature. They say that we take too much for our oral culture and that our writers take too much influence form the spoken word  tradition which is simple and the popular.’

So it seems that the literature scene here  is the opposite of the UK – which is embracing the spoken word as progressive and positive precisely because it reaches out to the people. In Brazil, spoken word is seen as reductionist, common and simplistic:  the culture is trying to move away from the popular, to create a distinct literature of its own, and build a vibrant, distinctive tradition of the written word. It is only just beginning – like all stories do.

Because in this culture, of heat, light and space, the body and not the mind is the tool for cultural expression. Music rules, Then football,  dance, art, design and architecture too. Brazil is a culture where the body rules in all its sensuality and exuberance. It boasts a corporeal and unashamedly extrovert aesthetic – so different from the British introverted attention to the inner workings of the imagination and mind. Perhaps climate determines culture. So what will happen to cultural distinctiveness with accelerated climate change?

That evening I give the first of my lectures  on the Arvon Magic. It’s in a bookshop in the middle of a Shopping Centre. In the front row are a boy of 4, and two girls of 8 and 10, with translation headphones resolutely clamped to their ears. They listen to me earnestly as I speak. Watch the slides of our  Arvon writing houses as they flick up on the screens. At the end, and many questions later, the children take the postcards I give them of Lumb Bank in Yorkshire. Write the first word which you think of when you wake up tomorrow I say to them, and see what journey that word takes you on….

Later that evening Julie and I taste our first Brazillian cocktail. A Ciphrani. One sip and you feel as if you have blasted into space and will never come back again ever.  I topple over the edge of sleep.

Arvon Director, Ariane Koek, was invited by the British Council to visit Brazil in her capacity as a literature development leader in the UK. We asked Ariane to record her time away. That record is published here, on the Arvon Blog, for the first time.

Sunday – December

When a helicopter parks on the roof opposite your hotel room, you know you have landed in a different world. What seems like pinpricks of blood in the night, are swarms of private helicopters buzzing across the skyline of Sao Paulo.

Founded in 1554, with over 10 million inhabitants, Sao Paulo is one of the largest cities on the planet. It is also one of the most violent. Cars with smoked windows snake through the streets, traffic jams last for hours and there’s a body guard posted on every corner. No wonder Sao Paulo’s privileged take to the air like in a Fellini film. The rich are so extremely rich that the city boasts the world’s second largest civilian use of helicopters. The buildings are so tall and square you feel as if you are in a Second Life New York, replete with mini Empire State buildings. Some of the high rise flats boast names like Lexington Avenue and Time Square to make your cultural confusion even more complete. They are bold columns holding up the sky, uniform in their height, their squareness and aspiration, but each building is also resolutely individual too: one has vermillion glass; another is embraced by black marble balconies; and there are a multitude of roof gardens spilling tendrils. . The message is pure Brazillian – individuality is for the masses. 

I’ve just had my first day here. I landed at 8am and was determined to seize the free time ahead of me. Julie Ellen Creative Director of the Scottish Playwrighting Studio is here too on this mission for the British Council to encourage the growth of a creative writing culture in Brazil. In an oral culture, in which music is highly advanced and literature plays second if not third or fourth fiddle, it feels like a responsibility neither of us can quite gauge.

So we take to the streets before the work begins and head towards the heartbeat of the city – Ibirapuera Park. It’s a huge green open space of over 2 million metres square, with two lakes, three museums and unusual architectural wonders. Like every Sunday in South America, the park is pure holiday: families feeding the giant carp which gasp for air in the 34 degrees heat; muscle bound men in micro shorts on rollerskates; balloons and candy floss festoon the air. And in the middle of it all, in this sweltering heat which sits on your skin like velvet, is the most unexpected sight of all: a skyscraping Christmas tree with baubles and a shining star. Size matters in this city where the small and tiny get swallowed whole.

A giant pink tongue licks the sky. It’s brazen and cartoon like. This is the famous auditorium, built by the great Brazillian architect Oscar Niemeyer who celebrates his 100th birthday on December 15th. The auditorium stands at the far corner of the park. From the back, it looks like a white concrete warehouse and promises nothing. Turn the corner, and the blank warehouse turns into a space ship, with Niemeyer’s trademark curves inspired by the mountains of his beloved Brazil. A yawning mouth invites you to step inside: and the enchantment doesn’t stop there. The interior dances too. Red sweeps of colour and light  bounce off every surface, it’s bewitching.  This is architecture is of  such intensity and sensuality that I feel as if my eyelids are being kissed…then licked.

Jump cut to later in the evening, and Julie and I are on the rooftop of the Unique Hotel. It’s a gigantic slice of water melon supported on either end by two columns. Built by Rhuy Okhtake a half  Brazillian, half Japanese architect who admires Niemeyer, it marries Oscar’s love of modernist curves with a Japanese restraint and purity. Niemeyer’s exuberant sensuality is held in check, but the building is no less powerful for it. Look up in the reception to the skylight 100s of metres above you, and you will see a glass ceiling on which water flows. The effect is magical.  Below, you are caught in ever changing rivulets and patterns of dancing watery light. If you then take the lift to the 17th floor to the Skye Bar, the skyline of Sao Paulo is presented as an infinite vista of skyscrapers and strobes. It has to be the most beautiful city scape I have ever seen, a panorama of jewel-like lights, studded by a panoply of high rise buildings and towers, alive with helicopters above and  humming with cars in the streets below. A crimson red swimming pool runs down the length of one side of the rooftop and appears to fall off the edge. Only when we look closely do we realise that we are not perching recklessly on a flat roof open to the world before us. There are huge glass panels holding us in: we are gawping goldfish in a bowl. And then we see the inescapable: the giant Christmas tree dominating the city with its winking baubles and  the star on top which is now a searchlight piercing the night sky in sweeping lighthouse rotations. You can go to the other side of the world and be in sweltering heat, but Christmas will always find you, wherever you are.

Sometimes life becomes so surreal, pinching yourself just won’t bring you back to earth. I had to go to a takeaway to remind myself of normality, amongst the debris of cardboard plates, plastic cups and discarded smiles.

It all started at breakfast - with a beaming smile attached to twinkling eyes and a white beard encircling the round jolly face of the man opposite.

“ G-day’ he said with that unmistakable down under twang “I have been belly dancing on the fringe all night.” Quite an opener when I am staring at a raft of English breakfast on the plate in front of me, trying to decide which saturated fat felon to cast away. I love first conversations - they always lead to new places and people and lives.

“You belly danced?”  I ask.

His roar shakes the room, and his twinkling glances off the  silver cutlery. He’s all llight and merriment and sharp observation and joy - this breakfast companion from the other side of the world. There is something other-worldy about him too. He looks as if he could have stepped out of Lord of the Rings.

“No, no. I merely observed. It was  the welsh women. They belly danced. And can they belly dance. My…” He is all appreciate chuckles as he spoons his muesli.

I ought to explain that I am  in Wales for the Guardian Hay Festival 2007. As Director of The Arvon Foundation, I am chairing four  writers’ events: Esther Freud and Rupert Thomson talking about their novels Love Falls and Death of a Murderer; Charles Leadbeater about his wiki work We Think; a discussion about the Myth and History of the Second World War with Owen Sheers, Justin Cartwright and Ben McIntyre; and then a conversation between the quirky american film maker and performance artist Miranda July and Marina ‘Tractors’ Lewycka. It’s pure joy  to read their books.

There.  So perhaps you get an idea of why I am here, in this beautiful Georgian house, with this wise gnome-like man eating breakfast and laughing.

But you only have part of the picture.

Another man comes in. Long and langurous with his beautiful wife. They sit down too.

“Ariane and I would like your royalties Sandy!’ roars the Lord of the Rings down under. ‘All of them. Make no mistake.”

The new breakfast companions have the same love of laughter too.  And two new people join us with the same belly aching senses of humour. By now the breakfast table is rocking. The room is aglow with words and ideas.
Breakfast at 7am will never be the same again. In your wildest dreams, breakfast with Thomas Keneally and Alexander McCall Smith and James Naughtie never happens. But this is Hay, and as Thomas K gnomically says later in the day, “at Hay dreams come true.”

The Festival is now bigger than ever. There’s a new site, which is sophisticated with wide white marquees, duckboard walkways which have canopies over them to protect you from the inevtiable Hay storms of wind and rain. But wellies and walking boots are still needed. This is Hay at 20 years old - sassy, smart,  committed, sparkling, intense and bigger. Writers are the superstars and the venues are packed with people eager to meet the writers, ask questions, jostle with ideas and just be together to appreciate literature. It’s the herd instinct gone wild - and it’s literature which has rounded  about100,000 people together over 10 days from all parts of the country and the world. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer who is one of Arvon’s patrons gives a key lecture called Writing on the Wall of Silence - about freedom of expression. The American writer Dave Eggers  talks with Valentino Achak Deng  about the book they have written together inspired by Valentino’s experiences in Sudan  and Ethiopia to a packed audience of 1200 plus people. Superstar art historian Simon Schama bounces and cavorts his way through his presentation on why television and art are natural partners.

It’s showtime with substance - and people buying, holding and reading books.

Who said the book is dead when there can be so much life in them-there hills? Hay rocks. 20 years old and Hay rocks on and on.

Ariane is reading
Justin Cartwright - The Sing Before it is Sung
Esther Freud - Love Falls
Miranda July - No One Belongs Here More Than You
Charles Leadbeater - We Think
Marina Lewkcya - Two Caravans
Ben McIntyre - The Zig Zag Agent
Owen Sheers - Resistance
Rupert Thomson - Death of a Murderer

Ariane is listening to
Seth Lakeman - Freedom Fields - again and again and again!
need to get the new Rufus Wainwright soon too…

Ariane is watching
Jan Svankmeyer - Lunacy

Ariane is looking at
Anthony Gormley at the Hayward Gallery

It’s early spring. The hedgerows peel away as I walk across field after field towards the broad lip of horizon beyond. There is such endless freedom in the remote Dorset countryside to cross boundaries. I have to do this once a month, or in London I become a crazed caged animal not being able to see the horizon everyday but instead being confronted by the indifference of buildings blunt with their denial of the fullness of the sky.

As I walk, I glimpse one half of a rainbow throwing its arch into a tree. The rest of the rainbow is invisible, until another arch lands three fields away. I am determined to try and trick the light so the whole rainbow will be revealed to me. So I try to change my angle, stepping out of a field lush with newborn lambs straight into the path of an oncoming car. That’s how I meet Gabriel a friend I haven’t seen for months who just happens at that particular moment, to be on that particular road, in that particular part of the countryside which is nowhere. He’s hundreds of miles away from home and about to go to Nigeria the next day. Serendipity - that’s what I think as he hugs me in the middle of this somewhere-nowhere, his wife beaming at me, and their two year old child Ben introducing me to Emily the dumper truck clutched tightly in his budding fist. Serendipity - I have been meaning to call you. Serendipity leading to the discovery that he and Sybilla have a friend who live two fields away from my father’s house. Serendipity - accidental happenings which lead to new knowledge.

In a world driven by the need to process our lives, serendipity is an endangered species It is undervalued and despised. Yet it is the triumph of the imagination and the very essence of any form of discovery. Without serendipity, Willelm Roetgen wouldn’t have discovered x rays, Henri Becquerel radioactivity, Isaac Newton gravity, Louis Daguerre photography. In science, serendipity holds a position which is inviolate but is seldom celebrated and shouted about. It threatens to throw science off its proud throne of high rationalism by introducing chance and imagination into the equation of living and discovery.

But serendipity is what art and science are all about. Just remember that moment when you write and your put two words together for the first time and they shout new meanings at you. Or think of when you pluck a random book from the shelves and you discover a new idea which feeds into your own thoughts. But with Amazon email recommendations, classes on how to be creative at the BBC, the proposal for GCSEs in creative writing, serendipity - the chance operation of the human spirit - is under threat. Society seems to be more and more driven to tame the imagination into a series of boxes
which can be ticked, to turn it into a series of processes which can be described and followed and not allow anything to chance. How wrong can we be?

In 1754 the great English eccentric who could never be boxed in, Horace Walpole, coined the term serendipity. He wrote a letter to his friend Horace Mann, an Englishman living in Florence saying:

“I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right-now do you understand serendipity?”

The fairy tale is replete with accidental discoveries leading to new knowledge. The three princes from the land of Serendip - the ancient word for Sri Lanka - can’t help themselves. Everywhere they turn, something happens which leads to something else. A captive girl they stumble upon in a forest turns out to be a princess and one of them is rewarded by having her hand in marriage. They are rescued from being put to death for identifying a camel they have never seen by a traveller steps forward to say that he has just seen the missing camel wandering in the desert. And so the King Bharam Gur doesn’t put them to death and they are given lavish rewards.

Randomness has its own rewards. As the American experimentalist composer John Cage said, his music was earthquake proof. By saying this, he meant that virtually anything could happen during the performance of one of his pieces - and it would be part of the piece. It was proof - precisely because it didn’t need to be excluded. Whether it was an earthquake, the sound of someone coughing, the blare of a siren - it would give his piece new life and lead to new music.

And so it is with life. Celebrate serendipity and who knows what words will ripple out of your keyboards on this soft spring day? Or what lines of prose and poetry will turn into the books which we can then pluck from the shelves and discover new ways of seeing the world? Take a chance. Throw away your map. Turn off your phone. Your Satnav. And go somewhere you’ve never been – with your words, mind and limb. Cross a field. Grab the arch of a rainbow. And just walk the line.

Best wishes -
Ariane Koek,
Director/Arvon Foundation

Ariane’s senses have been bombarded by:

Books
Southern Mail/Night Flight - Antoine Saint Exupery – Penguin Books

Exhibitions
James Turrell – A Life In Light – Louise T Blouin Foundation.

Film
Climates – Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Family Friend by Paolo Sorrentino

Music
A Chance Operation - The John Cage Tribute - Koch

The picture was taken by photographer Matthew Anderson at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The installation is Rachel Whiteread’s EMBANKMENT - an enormous art piece that comprises 14,000 casts of different sized boxes.

Imagine you are in an  white open space so endless that it unrolls like a blank page, as far as the eye can see. Would you have the words to fill this wilderness? You’re at the place where the global climate is born and where 900,000 years of history lies beneath your feet as you cross the snow.

This is precisely how landscape artist Chris Drury describes Antarctica where he’s living and working for 3 months in his  daily blog.   Go to his blog and you can see how he’s  recording in words and photographs, literally his impressions on the landscape: that’s how Chris describes his work - as making marks in the snow and ice. You can see a fingerprint whorl made by dusting snow off the blue ice with a dustpan and brush. Or a wind vortex made by the blades of the skidoo in fresh snow. This white wilderness offers an endless landscape of creative possibilities.  

As I sit reading his blog, it seems a million miles from what we do at Arvon. But is it? In a way, what Antarctica is offering is the ultimate extreme of the Arvon dream: the space and time to create and write.  Without space and time – you can’t write, let alone explore your imagination and creativity with the freeplay they deserve and demand. Creativity is dependent on these twin dimensions: Einstein must have realised this when he inspired physics to take a creative leap into new ways of scientifically describing the world. 

But creativity is also inspired by constraints and adversity  too. Chris’s time at Antarctica will have to end. You will have to finish your course. The day will end. We all have no choice but to accept our limits and then find freedom within them. Every  morning for the past 2 weeks I have been waking up and the first thing I do  before coming to work here at Arvon HQ is read a chapter from a book by Robert Harbison called Eccentric Spaces.  

It’s inspiring, extraordinary and challenging – crossing all the boundaries between poetry, philosophy, architecture and fiction. I am trying to make an art piece inspired by it – I won’t divulge what just yet. The book sets my imagination racing, as I cycle to work, blown by Robert Harbison’s words and thoughts which I then have to push aside when I get down to work here. At weekends, I squirrel time to think about his writing more and see where it leads me. 

But Robert’s book, like Chris’s work, or my musings, are limited and driven as much  by constraints as well as by freedom too. Eccentric Spaces was written when Robert was alone in America, friendless, without a publisher or a job and money.  He was told his book was unpublishable. In the end, it is the dream of freedom, which we can never attain, which drives us all to stretch our wings creatively. That’s what brings us real freedom. 

With my best wishes to you - Ariane Koek, Director/Arvon

  Ariane is reading/listening to/watching…

        Non Fiction  Eccentric Spaces by Robert Harbison   
        Poetry  Decreation by Anne Carson 
        Theatre  Faust by Punchdrunk Theatre
        Film  Babel 
        Music  Ys – Joanna Newsom