We are in a waiting room at the headquarters of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC). This year, we are celebrating the 80th anniversary of the day it shut down. Its utopia? Art and culture, weapons of peace, would be able to carry and embody the dialogue as well as the quest for better mutual understanding between people. We ate and drank there. We conceived the most generous dreams for the future. Romain Rolland, Stefan Zweig, Nicolai Bukharin, Vladimir Illich Lenin, Arthur Adamov, Georges and Ludmilla Pitoëff, Jacques Copeau, Igor Stravinsky, Giorgio Strehler, and Albert Cohen all crossed paths there. Philippe Macasdar, a former theatre director, former colleague at La Comédie, true connoisseur of stories and theatres and History, and especially a tireless storyteller, brings this period, which had such an impact on arts in Geneva and on Geneva itself, back to life.
“An invitation to travel to discover and appropriate, personally, what happened a hundred years ago in our city. By re-telling this story with his inimitable eloquence, like a knowledgeable and voluble uncle, Philippe Macasdar connects the past with the present. How can we live in Geneva? Maybe thanks to theatre.” NKDM
