The House

At Joanna Delia's Valletta place, The House, you never know who you're going to meet or what you might encounter. Last Monday there was wine and moonlight on her terrace overlooking the panorama and lights of Grand Harbour. Then leafing through his new 'silvered' book, nearly five-hundred lavish pages of it, with the Hungarian architect, designer and curator Ferenczfy-Kovács Attila – a lean black-garbed figure of tattoos and ringed fingers, journeying darkness, soul-states and memorial, the nerve crossings of womb, heart and mind. Iconic creator of the House of Terror, Holocaust Museum and House of Fates in Budapest. The man who stage-designed Zubin Mehta's Il Trovatore at the Vienna State Opera. Fantasist supreme, humanist extraordinary, humility in every word, a listener. Come Saturday night it was the turn of two sinuous Mexican dancers to seduce attention in an automaton routine of gesture, light and shadow reviving Valletta 18's Altofest endeavour four years ago, their  wiry actor/dancer director Giovanni Trono as clingingly embracing as ever. It's good to see him again. Back on the terrace, encounter receding, audience dispersed, I look eastwards to see a vast half-moon, ochre red, rising lantern-like out of the ocean, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn waiting to greet her. A primordial scene unchanged for as long as man has stood on this spot. 

17 October 2022