2024 on the boards: the best of our reviews

Fabienne Arvers (without order)

The Meeting by Jonathan Capdevielle

A summit meeting between actress Camille Cottin and director Jonathan Capdevielle around the darkly hilarious novel by Katharina Volckmer, Jewish Cock.

Berenice by Romeo Castellucci

Stunning Isabelle Huppert in this performance where Romeo Castellucci seizes the Racinian tragedy with crazy freedom and absolute confidence in the capacity of theater to transform the human condition.

Elizabeth Costello. Seven lessons and five moral tales par Krzysztof Warlikowski

From his journey through the work of J. M. Coetzee, Krzysztof Warlikowski plunges us once again into the twists and turns of the complexity of human experience and gives us a moving meditation on transmission, old age and disappearance.

Bala Funk by Smaïl Kanouté

Smaïl Kanouté pays tribute to Brazilian resistance dances, clandestine and invisible, in an ode to afrofu

House chaos Joëlle Sambi

Poet, slammer, afrofeminist, Joëlle Sambi offers a musical, lyrical and poetic show of incredible strength and infinite precision in the choice of words which denounce a patriarchy where incest and sexual violence abound.

Jean-Marie Durand (without order)

The Journey to the East by Stanislas Nordey

My absent by Pascal Rambert

Carried by eleven actors, sometimes just out of the school of the National Theater of Strasbourg, the play written and directed by Pascal Rambert examines the evils, the secrets and the infinite need for consolation of beings at the moment of 'a death. Tense and soft.

Opening ceremony of the Olympic Games by Thomas Jolly

If it is not theater in itself, the ceremony designed by Thomas Jolly pushes the live show to a meta-level of unequaled intensity, where the image, the sound, the television show, the performance, the dance merge for an extraordinary show that warmed hearts.

Skinless by Théo Mercier

Suffocating and organic, deployed in the heart of a landscape of waste, Théo Mercier's choreography oscillates between sculpture and performance. A dance announcing the end of the world, the end of a love story, a vibrant call to metamorphosis, to deviance, to the unpacking of bodies, to skins being torn off.

Demon – El funeral de Bergman d'Angélica Liddell

Igor Hansen-Løve (sans order)

Absalon, Absalon! by Séverine Chavrier

It is the work of an artist who searches and ends up finding, a creator of corrupted worlds crossed by a delightful black humor. Rarely has Faulkner's prose been so bewitching.

Demon – El funeral de Bergman d'Angélica Liddell

A punk performance that purges its anxieties through the stage. With her love for Bergman as a starting point, the Castilian priestess hits where it hurts, and strangely it feels good.

quartet by Jacques Vincey

Stanislas Nordey and Hélène Alexandridis portray monsters imprisoned in their perversity and their era. A show that delights for the performance of its immense actresses.

Quixote by Gwenaël Morin

The adaptation of the most famous picaresque novel, with Jeanne Balibar in the title role. A brilliant idea, a poetic achievement and one of the most beautiful surprises of the Avignon Festival.

Memory of Mankind by Marcus Lindeen and Marianne Ségol

A unique reflective theater that addresses both the mind and the body. Marcus Lindeen and Marianne Ségol have really invented something new.

Jean-Marc Lalanne

1 Liberty Cathedral by Boris Charmatz

On the completely redeveloped stage of the Châtelet or in a stadium in Avignon, the Tanztheater Wuppertal troupe led by Boris Charmatz makes the bodies exult in breathtaking jubilation. To the sound of bells and organs, an incredible pagan ceremony, contagious and galvanizing.

2 Quixote by Gwenaël Morin

3 The Journey to the East by Stanislas Nordey

4 Opening ceremony of the Olympic Games by Thomas Jolly

5 Stand up by Suzanne de Baecque

The idea evokes certain performance stories by Sophie Calle: the author infiltrates a regional miss competition and recounts all the issues (for the candidates, for society) and the unthought of this type of competition. An inventive, funny, extremely wise and intelligent show.

Philippe Noisette

1 Rearray de William Forsythe

Rearray, trio of barely twenty minutes for the Paris Opera Ballet, is a peak of intelligence. William Forsythe, a major artist, has not finished making his mark.

2 Soliloquy et My brothers and sisters by Tiziano Cruz

Discovered at the last Avignon Festival, Tiziano Cruz, an “indigenous and queer” Argentinian artist, weaves the intimate and the political with unstoppable force in these solos. We didn't get over it.

3 Witness by Saïdo Lehlouh

Resurgence of gestures borrowed from hip-hop gestures, Witness is a great current, musical and committed piece. Saïdo Lehlouh finally enters the big leagues.

4 Austerlitz by Gaëlle Bourges

Taking W. G. Sebald's immense book as a starting point, Gaëlle Bourges works on memory
dance in a show full of sensations. Stunning.

5 Shiraz d'Armin Hokmi

Formerly spotted as a dancer, the Iranian Armin Hokmi signs Shiraz, first disturbing choreography. Between tradition and contemporaneity, the movement according to Hokmi is universal.

Patrick Deaf

1 Hamlet by Christiane Jatahy

The delicate spleen of Clotilde Hesme captivates the role of Hamlet in a fortress in Elsinore where Heiner Müller and Virginia Woolf are also summoned.

2 The Secret Life of Old People by Mohamed El Khatib

A band aged 70 to 102 years old whose message is as simple as it is explicit: “Let us cum and fuck off!”

3 quartet by Jacques Vincey

Heartbreaking rewriting of Dangerous connections, this oratorical joust is a fascinating dance of specters where all shots are allowed.

4 The Journey to the East by Stanislas Nordey

The power and clarity of a
reading which sheds light on Christine Angot's indictment with modesty, grace and determination. Grandiose.

5 Leviathan by Lorraine de Sagazan

A hallucinated vision of the world of a court of justice, Sagazan places us in the belly of the monster to denounce the institution with chilling cruelty.