To give you some idea
of how Sacha's concept was presented to
the students, I've done the rough sketch/montage
below but it's
nowhere near accurate. Why didn't anyone
think of keeping a photographic record of
the whole experience? Too busy,
I guess.
My father had gathered
an enthusiastic team of volunteers and everyone
pitched in with ideas and work. Two giant
wooden spools were built by a local carpenter
and a very long roll of canvas was
wound around them. With the spools positioned
an appropriate distance apart, mounted
on spindles and rotated by two people
standing at either end, hidden by curtains,
the sequence of images painted on the canvas
slowly unrolled before the audience.
The students - no more
than about five or ten at a time - sat
on high-backed chairs in one of the large,
beautiful rooms of the house.
In dim light, a recorded narration and music
were played, paced to match the unwinding
canvas. A film, without film
technology. There were no computers, no
PowerPoint, no DVDs or CDs at the time but
the performance was all the more intriguing
for being so low-tech and DIY.
Where is that recording
of the House of Contrasts script?
I don't know, but I do have a copy
of some of the text. Where is that huge roll
of canvas? Possibly
in Rome, in storage, unless destroyed.
And who painted it? Um...moi...with
slight assistance from
an Italian multi-media artist and conversationalist.
When I first walked
into the Villa Ulivi, I was astonished by
the buzz of creative activity. My mother
and little brother had arrived from New York
as well as several relatives from France,
recruited to help with the proceedings.
There were also the Italian crew and of course
my older sister Annie (autobio
P.16) a key player in my father's scheme.
Annie was working at the time for a student
travel company in New York and it was she
who organised the visits of students to the
House of Contrasts, as well as taking them
to meet leading personalities on the Italian
cultural scene. There she met her future
husband, the writer Gerardo
Guerrieri, but that's yet another story.
My main role was to
illustrate Sacha's Dante-esque script on
that huge roll of canvas but I had insisted,
even before seeing it, that I would need
help. So my father found and somehow - unbelievably
- managed to persuade a very busy artist/architect/designer
to be my 'collaborator'. This collaboration
was the most enjoyable I've ever experienced
but it consisted almost entirely of talking.
Before coming to Italy,
I did not know that talking could be an art-form
or that a mere verbal exchange could be a
performance, with all the colour, magic and
mystery of opera. Or that it could actually
be a substitute for action. All Italians
can talk this way but some are more gifted
than others and Giorgio was a genius at it.
I don't remember a word of what we talked
about but it must have concerned the
task we were supposed to be working on. Did
Giorgio ever apply brush to canvas? I don't
remember that either but he did have great
ideas.
The
canvas had to be ready for the first presentation
of the summer and Giorgio was very busy with
his multiple activities so I found myself
inevitably and urgently responsible for covering
that six-foot tall and endlessly wide ribbon
of canvas with interpretations of Sacha's
verbal panorama of hellish and heavenly stereotypes.
I think I used a lot of red and black in
painting the hellish and a lot of pastel
hues for the heavenly but apart from that,
don't ask me what the finished work looked
like because it has entirely escaped my memory.
What I do remember
nostalgically
was the table at mealtimes. There were usually
at least a dozen people around the long,
chunky table and much laughter and animated
talk while huge bowls of pasta and fresh
green salad were devoured and glasses were
refilled with the local wine. Outside on
the stone terrace small green lizards dozed
in the sun. My little brother loved the lizards
and imitated their shy, watchful concentration.
Here he is at that time, making like a lizard
at Villa Ulivi, the House of Contrasts.
