As I found when I first moved to France, you don’t have to look far for ‘cultural’ or artistic events and activities. One great example is a parade I attended this past weekend which was the opening ceremony for a Biannual Dance festival. I went to the parade knowing that it mostly highlighted performances from local dance studios. I don’t know much about dance, but the performances were really surprising to me. Obviously hours had been poured into the choreography of the different groups, the costumes, the timing, the music, and I thought on the whole it was really well done. What surprised me, though, was that for a very big, well advertised parade the choice of dance was contemporary, and at times, just plain weird. In my mind, contemporary art in any form remains fairly inaccessible to the general public. This kind of thing doesn’t shock people here, but I have a feeling it would be less well received in the US. The question is, why? Not so much why wouldn’t a French person f...