Director Angélica Liddell, with her “radical dramaturgy”, opens the 78th Avignon Festival on Saturday evening, a major festive event which celebrates theatre but is being held this year in the unprecedented and “disrupted” context of the legislative elections.
This edition (June 29-July 21) has been brought forward due to the Paris Olympic Games, which will require a massive mobilization of law enforcement, leading to fears of lower attendance at the off festival in the first few days.
For its director Tiago Rodrigues, the festival, also affected by the calendar of the two rounds of legislative elections (Sunday June 30 and July 7), “is more necessary than ever”, “in the disturbed context of French politics” after the dissolution of the National Assembly by President Emmanuel Macron.
He stressed that it was a “democratic, popular, republican, ecological, feminist, anti-racist” event and called for a blockade of the extreme right at the ballot box.
Saturday afternoon, festival-goers and tourists began to slowly take over the streets of the inner city, where a few off-stage companies, in costumes, distributed invitations for their show, while numerous plots, garden gates, gutters and street lamps were covered with posters, noted an AFP journalist.
On the stage, the most famous theatre festival in the world (along with Edinburgh), founded in 1947 by Jean Vilar and which transforms the face of Avignon every year with its posters and spectators flooding the streets, is putting the spotlight on the Spanish language this summer.
It is also a Spanish artist, Angélica Liddell, known for disturbing shows, who will open the festivities in the main courtyard of the Palais des Papes with the piece “Dämon. El funeral de Bergman”.
The second part of a trilogy devoted to death, it is a dive into the world of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, who had imagined and carefully written his own funeral, after seeing the funeral of Pope John Paul II on television.
– “Powerful and radical dramaturgy” –
The opportunity, for the playwright, to organize the parade of her own demons, “shame, anger, fear of death, loneliness, fear of madness” and, “above all, the worst of demons, guilt”, “the most destructive thing there is”, “like a spider egg stuck in the throat oozing poison”, she declared in an interview with AFP.
The play is not recommended for children under 16 (scenes that may be shocking). “I try to convey the strength of ideas through an aesthetic shock whose main objective is emotion, this pre-feeling, that is to say the nervous sensation before the feeling, which leaves the spectator in a situation of vulnerability and anguish in the face of what he cannot explain or understand,” she commented.
Presenting this artist “with powerful and radical dramaturgy” was “urgent, at a time when we see so many attacks against freedom of expression and artistic freedom”, estimated Tiago Rodrigues when presenting the program in April.
“It’s also supporting artistic and aesthetic discourses that can shake us up,” he said. The Spanish artist, in 2021, took a performance to the extreme, with self-mutilation on stage.
This year, some 35 pieces, a third of which highlight Spanish or Latin American artists, are programmed.
More than 1,600 shows are also on offer at the off festival, the largest live performance market in France, which officially opens on July 3 (until the 21st), although nearly 25% of them are previewed from the 29th.
Finally, note that, to reduce waste production, as in 2023, the number of posters per show is controlled by a distinctive sticker, ensuring a maximum number limited to 150, indicate the organizers of the off.
And, while the transport of sets and materials is an expensive item, the sets of around twenty companies from Île-de-France are for the first time being transported to Avignon by shared rail freight.
