Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

“BEAU spectacle!” reports France’s Le Monde of a new production at Paris’s Bastille Opera. The choreographer inspiring this plaudit is called Waltz. Yes, that’s her real family name.

Sasha Waltz has been the toast-of-town in Berlin's dance world for a decade. Many of her shows, including perhaps her most famous, “Körper” (Bodies), have toured the world. Breaching the formidable walls of the Bastille is the 44-year-old German’s version of Berlioz’s “Romeo and Juliet”. It opened on October 5^th to extravagant applause, with another Paris daily, Libération, citing its “superb, fluid, aerial pas de deux”, performed by the Paris ballet’s stars, Aurélie Dupont and Hervé Dupont, as the star-crossed lovers.  read more »

SHAKESPEARE & Company, Paris's famously ramshackle Anglo-American bookshop on the city's Left Bank, is more than just a place to pick up a paperback. It is Paris's equivalent of San Francisco's City Lights bookstore, a bohemian hub once frequented by Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg and Anaïs Nin. Besides rare editions, second-hand books and the latest literary phenomena, the store holds regular workshops for aspiring writers.

One such group is "The Other Writer's Group", which gathers every Saturday in the bookshop's library. To reach this room, you must walk to the back of the shop, past a coin-filled wishing well, turn right at the old piano and clamber up the creaky wooden staircase to the first floor, where bookshelves threaten to topple at every turn. At the top of the staircase, someone has created a tiny writer's den, a closet-sized cubby-hole that is open to anyone who cares to write in it. The tiny library is just opposite.

On a recent Saturday, the writers' group huddled in this oak-beamed, musty room, with books crammed into every crevice. David, a young British writer with spiky black hair, was in charge, and about eight people had brought a piece of writing to share. A dishevelled Italian girl with a rucksack read out her story first, looking decidedly jet-lagged. She had just flown in from Tokyo, and planned to spend the night at Shakespeare & Co, perhaps on the very mattress she was sitting on.

There are beds and sleeping bags tucked away all over the shop: in between bookcases; hidden behind curtains, doubling up as sofas. The shop's owner, 91-year-old George Whitman, provides a bed for the night in return for a few hours' help in the shop. He sees Shakespeare & Co as "a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore". About 50,000 people have slept here since it opened in 1951.

The Italian girl's story turned out to be a morose reflection on suicide. When she finished, everyone looked thoughtful, and an unspoken question hung in the air (was it autobiographical?). Suddenly there was a sound from the corner of the room, where an elderly man had been sitting quietly on his own, hunched over a history book, apparently oblivious to all around him. "When does this library close?" he called out to no one in particular. "It's open until midnight, but you can join our group if you like, and critique," offered someone. "Oh, you wouldn't wanna hear my critique," grumbled the man, and returned to his book.

Next up: a plump blonde American woman in her late fifties, whose fast-paced romp transfixed the room. Her plot involved sex-crazed senior citizens, the French porn industry and a famous cemetery. It bubbled with confidence, and no one was surprised when she revealed herself to be a published author. Half-way through, a nervy young man in his 20s appeared and perched on a chair near the door. He was an unpublished poet, and with just a few lines--delivered in a deep Southern drawl--he recounted the death of his grandfather. It was terse, spare and brilliant.

After the reading, there was a short writing exercise, and then everyone ambled over to a nearby café to swap notes and discuss the next "Spoken word", an open-mic poetry session in Paris's trendy 11^th arrondissement.

The Other Writers Group is just one of the weekly writing classes held at Shakespeare & Co. 27 rue de la Bucherie, Paris 75005. Tel: 33 (0)1 43.25.40.93. Open: daily, noon-midnight.

Our friend and colleague Sarah Dallas, editor of Cities Guide on Economist.com, sends us a first letter from Paris:

“La rentrée” is a serious matter in Paris. From late August, as families reappear after three-week holidays, and shops and bistros gingerly roll back their shutters, the city begins to bristle with a back-to-school charge. This year, the sense of anticipation is especially palpable: President Nicolas Sarkozy made a stunning three-month debut; what will the man, dubbed “the human bomb” by the New Yorker, do next? And then there is the matter of the mayoral elections. Will Bertrand Delanoë, the environmentally-minded socialist mayor, sail into a second term next March, or will Mr Sarkozy’s UMP party come up with a candidate sparkling enough to swing this essentially conservative city back to the right?

On the cultural front, this autumn’s leading exhibitions include a display of paintings at the Musée du Luxembourg by Arcimboldo, an unnervingly surreal 16th-century court painter who made his name with portraits composed of still-life objects (fruits, grains, books). If that doesn’t tempt (some of the paintings are oddly unappetising), the Musée Jacquemart André has an astonishing collection of works by Frangonard in its 19th-centry palace, while the Musée d’Orsay is profiling Gustave Courbet, a 19th-century pioneer of Realism. The show includes the groundbreaking “Burial at Ornans”, a huge canvas which Courbet saw as his “burial of Romanticism”.

On the other side of the river, two orchestras currently in dazzling form swoop into the refurbished Salle Pleyel: Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (October); and Antonio Pappano’s London Symphony Orchestra (November). Opera and ballet fans will have to wait until 2008 for this season’s big hitters (such as a visit from the Bolshoi Ballet), but French-speaking theatre-goers should note a daring new production of “Cyrano de Bergerac”, which will be performed in 20 different venues in Paris, including Sainte-Chapelle (of the famous stained-glass windows) and the city’s Oscar Niemeyer-designed communist party headquarters.

After a drizzly summer, the sun is shining and there is promise in the air. France is back on the global stage, and Parisians are sashaying into September looking decidedly jaunty. Many will have tucked into their bags a copy of the season’s most talked-about paperback: "L'aube, le soir ou la nuit" ("Dawn, Evening or Night"), a portrait of the limelight-loving president during his election campaign, by Yasmina Reza, a French playwright (whose works include "Art"). The New York Times calls it "fall’s literary sensation".  read more »