The extraordinary Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative marks its 20th anniversary this year. And where better to celebrate that milestone than in one of the world’s great crucibles of culture, Athens? Prestige flies in for the party.
You see them whenever you pick up a glossy magazine, watch advertisements featuring celebrities from the worlds of showbusiness, fashion and sport – beautiful people for whom elegance is an attitude and time
is precious, and who are unlikely to crack under pressure. Flip through to the social pages and you might even spot the very same faces, this time standing onstage with arm crooked at the elbow and watch glitteringly displayed upon an upturned wrist.
Such endorsements such aren’t new. Indeed, the power of star association has been central to the business of selling watches for at least 100 years – and it’s evidently as potent now as it ever was. Yet for one brand in particular, it’s never been solely about celebrity and nor, for that matter, pretty faces.
Rolex’s founder Hans Wilsdorf may not have possessed much in the way of watchmaking skills, but he did know how to sell his products to exactly the right people. Determined from the outset to make timepieces of the highest quality, he was also quick to appreciate the sales impetus that might be gained from their association with world-beating achievements in the realms of sport and exploration. Thus, in the late 1920s Rolex partnered with the first British cross-Channel woman swimmer Mercedes Gleitze, in the 1930s with the world land-speed record-holder Malcolm Campbell and, in the early 1950s, with the British Everest expedition and its successful first ascent of Earth’s highest mountain.
Through the non-profit foundation he set up in 1945, which continues to own the company, Wilsdorf’s philosophies guide Rolex to this day. In fact, it’s probably fair to say no other watch manufacturer presides over such a comprehensive – and, it should also be said, worthy – range of sponsorship and philanthropic initiatives. Rolex’s involvement in sports, such as yachting, tennis, golf, equestrianism and motor racing, needs little introduction, but perhaps less well known is its support for environmental projects, scientific research and life-improving enterprise. And then there’s the Perpetual Arts Initiative, which partners with leading institutions, performers and practitioners in the fields of music, cinema and architecture, and is also behind what’s arguably the most exciting initiative of all, the Rolex Mentor and Protegé Initiative.
Much like the passing on of skills from one generation of craftspeople to another, a practice still prevalent in the luxury watch industry, the programme has over the past 20 years enabled established architects, artists, dancers, filmmakers, musicians, performing artists and writers from around the world to impart their knowledge and experience to promising young talents in each of those fields. Moreover, it’s a learning experience that’s often broadened the horizons of both of the parties involved.
The numbers are staggering. During the two decades since the programme began in 2002-2003, 63 leading artists from 29 countries have provided mentorship to the same number of aspirants from 41 countries; 96 choreographies, 306 stage plays and live performances, 196 films and 154 architectural constructions have been created; 87 novels, short stories, poetry collections and other works have been published – and I could go on. And on. The sheer scale and ambition of this ongoing initiative that contributes so much to the world’s cultural patrimony are so unique that its 20th anniversary this year deserved a special kind of celebration. The questions were simply where and how best to do it.
The answer to the first lay, if not exactly on Rolex’s doorstep in Geneva, then around 1,700km away on the shores of the Aegean Sea. One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, whose human history dates back at least to the seventh millennium BCE and possibly a good deal longer, Athens is one of the great crucibles of civilisation, a place whose contributions to knowledge and culture run the gamut from democracy to philosophy, medicine to mathematics, architecture to the alphabet, and theatre to sport. Dominated by the great rocky outcrop of the Acropolis and the ruined Parthenon that sits atop it, the Greek capital displays reminders of its remarkable legacy at almost every turn – and, just as important, the city’s present-day network of cultural institutions, which include the Athens Conservatoire, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, the Benaki Museum at Pireos 138, the Megaron Concert Hall and the breathtaking Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre, a vast modernist palace of glass overlooking Athens’ Bay of Faliro, are of genuine world-class stature. As a setting in which to celebrate the programme’s achievements, it was on reflection an obvious choice.
As to the how, the organisers set about the Herculean task of bringing from far-flung points around the globe as many of the mentors and former protégés – after “graduation” from the programme they’re known as fellows – as were able to make the journey, all of whom would take part in a week-long Rolex Arts Festival, of which three days are open to the public, held on the last weekend in May. (And as many of the assembled artists would team up with local musicians, dancers and other performers who’d help them realise their productions on an Athens stage, their stays in the Greek capital would turn out to be a good deal longer.) It hardly needs saying that making all of the above happen according to a strict timetable – and in a packed programme involving around seven events each day held in several venues around the city – was, to put it mildly, a challenge.
Nonetheless, from the moment we left the hotel on a glorious Friday morning and set out on the first of our three daily walks through the National Garden – one of the loveliest urban parks I’ve ever strolled through – to kick off the festival at the Athens Conservatoire, it was evident the programme would unfold with perfectly coordinated (if not quite Superlative Chronograph-timed) precision. We began the programme by sitting in on A Word in Your Ear, an engrossing seven-way conversation between fellows (and all now successfully published writers) Naomi Alderman, Julia Leigh, Antonio García Ángel, Edem Awumey, Miroslav Penkov, Julián Fuks and Colin Barrett.
(And two days later, thanks to the delightful air of ease, approachability and openness that pervaded the entire proceedings, we felt equally privileged to bask in the wisdom and wit of Barrett’s mentor, the Irish literary great Colm Tóibín, during a relaxed chat over a lengthy lunch.)
After an introduction by dance mentor Crystal Pite, Senegalese dancer Khoudia Touré and a young team (many of whom she’d only begun working with just days ago, a tribute in itself to the quality of the local talent) then mesmerised the audience with their energy, vibrancy and portrayals of youthful vulnerability. The ensemble’s performance of Touré’s work Óró combined improvised dialogue, hip hop and athleticism with more traditional dance forms to extraordinary dramatic effect.
The scene then shifted to the National Museum of Contemporary Art, where visual-artist fellows Camila Rodríguez Triana and Thao Nguyen Phan discussed the mentorship experience before presentations of their work and that of other former protégés. How to top that? Easy, when it’s a long evening of opening-night festivities at the Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre, beginning with cocktails beneath this fabulous gleaming structure, then continuing to the theatre for live performances, guest appearances, films and addresses involving a rollcall of talent from across the arts – stellar names including the American theatre director Robert Wilson, architect, urban planner and mentor Sir David Chipperfield, jazz singer Dianne Reeves (who, with her Korean protégé, Song Yi Jeong, performed an entrancing vocal interpretation of Pat Metheny’s “The First Circle”, accompanied only by a solo guitarist) and the incomparable Brazilian singer-songwriter (and the country’s former minister of culture) Gilberto Gil.
And the opening day still wasn’t over, with Artemis: Fountain, an otherworldly performance by Peruvian musician Pauchi Sasaki (who was mentored by none other than composer Philip Glass) and the Chóres vocal ensemble, bringing us all outside into the balmy evening air, after which we climbed slowly up and around the towering flanks of the Niarchos Centre – much as if ascending some vast Mezoamerican pyramid – for a late-night dinner beneath the stars.
I won’t bore you by recounting the details of all the talks, performances, installations and presentations during the three-day programme. Some, like a group exhibition by five architecture fellows at the Benaki Museum – it was introduced by Chipperfield, who only days earlier had been awarded the 2023 Pritzker Prize – and a subsequent discussion on the topic of Lifelong Learning, which involved writer Bernadine Evaristo, theatre director Julie Taymor and Greek director-choreographer Dimitris Papioannou, were genuinely spellbinding and uplifting. One or two others, which I won’t name, seemed to this cultural philistine to be at best baffling and
at worst plain daft. No matter. Far more important was the fact that without the support of the Rolex Mentor and Protegé programme, none of these performers and artists would have been afforded such a prestigious and cross-cultural global platform – or such priceless opportunities to grow and develop. Long may this estimable initiative continue.
It’s sufficient to say that when Sunday evening eventually arrived, the Rolex Arts Festival could not have ended on a higher or more exhilarating note. After immersing ourselves in The Predatory Chord, a hypnotic if deeply unsettling soundscape installation by the Australian-Icelandic musician Ben Frost, we trooped out into the gardens behind the Megaron Concert Hall for dinner and the festival’s closing concert. Onstage, successive performances by Egyptian singer Dina Elwedidi, her mentor Gil and the Honduran singer Aurelio Martinez eventually culminated in a joyous jam, all underpinned by the rhythmic wizardry of former protegé (and grandson of the great jazz drummer Roy Haynes) Marcus Gilmore, a man whose extraordinary abilities behind the trap set would suggest the possession of at least two pairs of arms, and possibly even the same number of feet. A future Haynes, Elvin Jones or Tony Williams? No question – he’s right up there among them already.
We swayed, we danced and we sang, bathing in the artistry and the exuberance while holding on to each passing minute in the fervent hope the magic would never end. And as for any watch-flaunting bimbos, there was mercifully no sign whatsoever.
(Header image: The stunning Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre, scene of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative’s gala opening ceremony)