Si tu pars au hasard tu ne risques pas de te perdre.
Bertrand Castelli
[If you let the hazards show you the way you will not get lost.]
"When I was fourteen years old, I wanted to be Picasso, I wanted to be Stravinski, to be Céline, to be Sartre, I wanted to be everyone I admired. At the same time, more than anything, I wanted to be me." It was 1943, the war was on, Paris was occupied by the Nazis, food was scarce, violence was a daily reality.
It was a dark time to be coming of age in the City of Light. Bertrand Castelli told his mother that he had 'great plans' and needed a place of his own. He moved into a miserable little room with a friend and took a job as assistant projectionist for a cinema. A year later, Paris was liberated and the trains began returning from the camps. Young Bertrand would help to lead or carry those damaged people off the trains and to the hospital. He has never forgotten the pain and despair in their eyes.
"My friends and I began to paint and dance and sing, to create ballets, operas and plays. I realize now that we were desperately trying to feel alive, to forget the fear, to find peace. Pursuing art and beauty was the only way we could deal with the absurdity all around us."
The war finally ended, but Paris was still in chaos. People were doing whatever they could to survive. A friend who operated the lights for a small circus offered sixteen-year-old Castelli a little money to be his assistant. "Our circus toured Germany in 1947. Even though their country and their lives were in ruins, the people would come at night and pay a few coins to watch the show, I guess to escape reality for a short while. We all need beauty in our lives." Often there was only enough power to light the ring so the trapeze artists could barely be seen. But the circus teaches you to create beauty from almost nothing. And so Castelli had the idea to give them all flashlights to shine on each other as they performed. The result was enchanting. Years later he used the same effect in the musical Hair.
Castelli remembers the great discipline and resourcefulness of circus people. And their humility. "Everyone helped each other. We would put up the tent, set up the trapeze, convince the police to leave us alone, stop people from stealing equipment, put on the show, then take everything down and move on to the next town. It was tiring work and I had to sleep in the car with the lighting gear, and yet, the circus is where I learned everything I would need for the operas, the ballets and the theater that followed."
Upon leaving the circus, Castelli was sought after by ballet and opera companies in Paris who were impressed by his innovative lighting techniques. At just nineteen, he was commissioned to tour with the famed company Le Ballet de Carmen Amaya. Paris was the beating heart of so many new genres and movements. Anything was possible. "All my friends were in the Arts. Money was not important to us. Yes, we needed it to buy bread and wine and to travel a bit, but we didn't look upon Art as a business. For us, it was necessary to dream, to create, to shine and, most importantly, to find some meaning in the years we had lost to the war."
With this in mind, Castelli longed to create a great ballet called Les Algues, which would show beauty emerging from horror. But he was only twenty-one and had no money. Fortunately, through his job designing posters, he had discovered the power of advertising. He created a little ballet called Le Coleur de Fische in which ten large advertising posters would come to life on stage with each product given a three-minute solo. He then brazenly pitched huge companies such as Perrier, Cartier, Christian Dior and Cointreau. No one had done this before, the companies were intrigued, the money rolled in—enough to do Les Algues exactly as he wished.
He could afford the well-known composer Guy Bernard. He hired the great ballerina Janine Charrat to choreograph the piece and dance the lead role. He booked the finest theater in Paris and hired Europe's best dancers. His sets and costumes were designed by celebrated artists.
Les Algues was a cause célèbre. People came from around the globe to see it. Castelli was welcomed into the hallowed circle of Picasso, Dali, Sartre, Céline, Giacometti and other luminaries of the time. He was made.
Over the next few years he created, produced and directed acclaimed works for Les Ballets Africaines, Champs Elysees Theatre and the Marquis de Cuevas Ballet Company. The 'great plans' he'd had as a boy were materializing. "I suppose I could have stayed and continued to reap the benefits, but somehow I knew that I would never be a man unless I questioned myself, unless I confronted new situations." At precisely that time, the United States was granting special visas to people who could help expand America's cultural base: mathmeticians, composers, vintners, landscape architects and, yes, stage lighting experts. At twenty-four years of age, with no definite plans and very little English, Castelli moved to New York City.
Everything was new and strange. The young Parisian experienced total despair, great joy, fear, curiosity, loneliness, hope. These mixed emotions and the alien milieu enabled him to write, to come up with new ideas, to grow. When MGM offered him a contract, he moved to Hollywood and entered one of the most eclectic and productive times of his career. He wrote screenplays, numerous stage plays including The Umbrella which played on Broadway and in London, episodes of the television show The Millionaire, and a musical comedy with poet Ogden Nash and Broadway's Vernon Duke. Surprisingly, he also 'uncovered' a talent from his colorful past: "I remembered that I was very, very good at choreographing striptease!" He began directing shows for The Body Shop, the famous club on Sunset Boulevard. "Some of my vignettes were funny, some beautiful, some very erotic, but no two were the same. I realized it was best to create each number according to the girl." This was knowledge he would use to great advantage throughout his career. "I learned that you must find the beauty in people, not impose your sense of beauty on them. Ask them to give you what they can, and then choose the right way to create the performance."
Hollywood provided stimulating and influential friends: Gene Kelly, Igor Stravinsky, Aldous Huxley, John Van Druten, Dorothy Parker, Ray Bradbury and more, who taught him much and opened many doors. His MGM contract paid very well. Life was good. But, as before, Castelli sensed when it was time to leave. "My life, which seemed marvelous, was also dangerous in a way. I had gone from circus to ballet to opera to theater to film until nothing in my world felt real, everything was backstage. It was time to question myself again. I entered a long period of total withdrawal."
In 1968, Bertrand Castelli burst back into international prominence as Executive Producer of the phenomenally successful musical HAIR, The American Tribal Love Rock Musical. Not only was Hair Broadway's first rock musical, it also featured the first racially-integrated cast, showed the first male and female nudity, and was the first authentic depiction of the hippie lifestyle of peace, drugs, free love and rock-and-roll. Add the anti-Vietnam theme, exuberant sexuality, and counter-cultural views, and it's easy to see why Hair created huge controversy—and long line-ups—wherever it went. And it went everywhere! New York, Los Angeles, London, virtually every country in western Europe, Australia, Japan, Israel, Brazil. Many of the productions were directed as well as produced and promoted by Castelli.
"I believe that my main contribution to Hair came in the auditions. I would listen to a person's voice and while they were singing I would see who they are through the dream they have for themselves. In this way, I was able to discover many great talents: Diane Keaton, Donna Summer, Melba Moore ." Others involved with Hair spoke of more profound contributions, implying that Hair's overall perspective was influenced by Castelli's philosophies and his broad, classical background. They claimed that "The look of the production is very existential ... it is the product of a grandchild of Sartre, dressed by Picasso." Castelli's influence indeed.
His vast experience touring ballets around the world enabled him to produce Hair in seven countries within a two year period. And—another first—he did so in the language of each country so that people could identify with the show. Previous to this, American musicals had always been performed in English, which limited their success in foreign countries.
Another decade of ballets, operas and musical comedies followed the Hair years. Then, in the mid-1980's Castelli visited the Yucutan Peninsula and met architect José Luis Morena who, with his wife Sally, was creating what would eventually become Maroma Resort and Spa. Here was beauty indeed. Breathtaking beauty. And peace. As well as the inspiration to return to one of the passions of his youth: painting.
Out came the cartons of sketches he had stored away but not forgotten, and down to paradise came Castelli, year after year, to paint the moments he had drawn so long ago: the circuses, the Spanish dancers, the hidden corners of Paris, the French countryside, friends, family, triumphs, regrets. Intimate glimpses behind the scenes of a memorable life.
Seduced by the natural beauty of the bay and the reclusive lifestyle he had always craved, his visits lasted longer and longer. "What is so fascinating about painting every day is that, eventually, it is the painting which is doing itself, it's not me anymore." He began to paint the scenes he encountered on his daily rambles through the jungle and along the beaches.
"We see beauty everywhere, but after a while we forget about it. That's why art is good. It captures a moment so that you can always return to it." During construction of the hotel, he lived in every room and created a painting for each of them. "I feel paintings should be shared. And I don't mean in a gallery. I like to see a painting hung where people can get used to it little by little."
"My life has been a pursuit of beauty—not of distractions because they don't make me happy—but of a wish to salvage beauty from the violence and fear around us. When I am doing that, my life has value."
Officially, Bertrand Castelli was Maroma's Artist-in-residence. Unofficially, he was an unpredictable, larger-than-life presence who fascinated all who met him.
It is with great sadness that we announce that Bertrand Castelli passed away on Friday August 1st, 2008. Bertrand was a beloved long-time resident of Maroma, whose paintings enliven the walls throughout the property. He shall be missed greatly.
