2023-07-05 21:22:48
The 77th Festival d’Avignon, one of the biggest theatrical events in the world, opened on Wednesday evening with a show transforming the Cour d’honneur into a social center and a minute’s silence in tribute to Nahel, the teenager killed by a policeman whose death sparked an outbreak of violence in France.
This minute of silence was observed at the request of the director Julie Deliquet, who is also the director of a theater located in Seine Saint-Denis, the poorest department in metropolitan France.
For its first edition, the new patron of the Festival, the Portuguese Tiago Rodrigues, has chosen to open the Festival with “Welfare”, a show of a social nature. It is an adaptation of Frederick Wiseman’s documentary on “15 anonymous heroes for a day in a New York welfare center”, he explained to AFP.
Filmed 50 years ago, this documentary “tells stories that are unfortunately still very topical about the relationship between the most vulnerable and the state but at the same time with this ability to find wealth in human comedy”.
For the occasion, the Court of Honor was transformed into a social assistance center, with a basketball court in the middle, benches, cupboards and mattresses around, noted an AFP journalist on the spot.
At the start of the day, many tourists and festival-goers began to flock to the City of the Popes, in a good-natured atmosphere. Every July, Avignon turns into a city-theatre, divided between the “in”, the official festival, and the “off”, the largest live performance market in France.
The Avignon Festival is spread over around forty places (for 44 shows), in the city but also outside the city, while the “off” has 140 places and hosts nearly 1,200 companies.
– “Building bridges” –
Another opening show: “GROOVE” by Bintou Dembélé, a hip-hop pioneer in France who organizes a dancing stroll.
The new boss of the event has decided to invite a language to each edition and, this year, English is in the spotlight, “in response to Brexit”.
The director of the Festival d’Avignon, the Portuguese Tiago Rodrigues, during a photo session in Paris on September 15, 2022 / AFP
“At a time when ramparts are being built to keep us away from our British friends, we have to build bridges. It’s a kind of cultural diplomacy,” he says.
Even before the start of the festival, the Portuguese had to deal with two bad surprises: the deprogramming of a highly anticipated show and the high cost of reopening a mythical place of the festival, the Carrière de Boulbon, about fifteen kilometers from Avignon.
Co-produced by the festival, “Les Emigrants” by Krystian Lupa, a Polish theater master, was canceled a month ago by the Comédie de Genève, where the premiere was to be held, due to a confrontation between the director, accused of abusive behavior, and the technical team.
It has been replaced by a piece by Tiago Rodrigues himself. “Not replacing it would have represented for the Festival d’Avignon a financial damage of more than 300,000 euros”, he explains. “I could not ask artists, especially emerging ones, to replace a show at the last moment at the Opéra Grand Avignon (700 seats). It would have been a huge risk-taking and very irresponsible”.
He claims not to have enough perspective on “this unfortunate episode”, while specifying that “no level of talent justifies violence”.
Second puzzle: the Boulbon Quarry, used for the first time in 1985 for Peter Brook’s “Mahabharata” and for the last time in 2016. Philippe Quesne will create “Le Jardin des délices” there, inspired by the painting by Jérôme Bosch .
Due to the fire risk system, after last summer’s fires in the region, 250,000 euros were added to the planned cost of 350,000 euros. The place is now “fully secure”.
On the security side, this edition, which starts after several days of urban violence in France, has been reinforced in terms of mobile force units, pedestrian areas, random identity checks in public spaces and pedestrian and mountain bike patrols. .
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