There is a particular quality of light in Saint-Paul-de-Vence on a June afternoon — the kind that falls at an angle through the narrow lanes and turns the honey-coloured ramparts almost amber. The village has always attracted people who feel things acutely: painters, writers, dancers who arrived for a week and stayed for decades. On the longest day of the year, that tradition finds a small, unassuming stage inside the old forge.
On Sunday 21 June, starting at 15h30, the municipal space known as the Vieille Forge — tucked within the medieval village itself — becomes the setting for an afternoon organised by the Cercle des Artistes de Saint-Paul-de-Vence. The event is part of the CASP MultiArt programme, and what is planned is deliberately intimate: a performance combining dance and live music, led by Lala Bastiani and Chantal Cavenel, woven together with moments of improvisation that draw in the people present.
A Forge, Repurposed
The choice of venue is not incidental. Old forges occupy a specific place in Provençal village life — workshops where the practical and the communal once overlapped, where neighbours gathered around heat and craft. Converted into a municipal cultural space, the Vieille Forge carries that residual sense of making things by hand, of process rather than product. It is the right kind of room for what the Cercle has in mind.
The Cercle des Artistes de Saint-Paul-de-Vence is a multi-disciplinary association dedicated to local artists — a structure built not around exhibitions alone but around the idea of shared creativity. Its gatherings tend to resist the formality of a conventional programme. The afternoon on 21 June follows that instinct: rather than a performance delivered to a seated audience, the plan includes improvised sequences shaped by whoever is in the room.
'Des ressentis poétiques' — poetic feelings, impressions — is the phrase the organisers use. It points toward something less finished than a recital, more alive than a workshop.
That quality of openness is, in fact, what makes the event worth noting. Dance and music in dialogue, with space left for the unscripted — it is a format that asks something small but real of the people present: attention, perhaps a willingness to be momentarily part of the work itself.
The Solstice as Context
The date is 21 June, which in France is also the Fête de la Musique — a national day when music spills out of concert halls and into streets, courtyards and village squares from Dunkirk to Nice. In the Alpes-Maritimes, the evening tends to belong to the larger coastal towns, where stages are set up along the promenades and crowds gather after dark. Saint-Paul-de-Vence, perched above the valley on its limestone ridge, offers something quieter and earlier in the day: an afternoon gathering inside the old walls, with the solstice light still high and the heat beginning to ease.
For anyone spending time on the Côte d'Azur in late June, the village needs little introduction as a destination. The Fondation Maeght sits just outside the ramparts; the main lane through the village passes galleries, ceramic workshops, and the famous café where Yves Montand and Simone Signoret once played pétanque. The afternoon at the Vieille Forge exists in a different register from all of that — smaller in scale, less curated, more contingent.
That contingency is the point. Lala Bastiani and Chantal Cavenel will bring their own prepared work, but the shape of the afternoon will depend in part on the room — on who arrives, how they respond, what the improvised passages become. In a village so thoroughly photographed and visited, there is something quietly subversive about an event that cannot be fully known in advance.
Come at 15h30, find the Vieille Forge, and let the afternoon take the form it takes.
