Billet
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Faced with the uncertainty of the legislative elections and against the threat of the extreme right, the Festival, which begins this Saturday, June 29, opens with a desire to highlight joyful and accessible theater, in an edition marked by transmission and memory.
This year, unlike any other, the Avignon Festival will begin on June 29, on the eve of the unexpected first round of legislative elections. It will end on Sunday, July 21, two weeks after results that are still partly unpredictable. What will France look like at the end of the 78th edition of the Festival? What will the Festival look like this year? Depending on the results of the vote, there will undoubtedly be more or less defeated faces, more or less spontaneous gatherings and happenings, and already, the Festival organization is thinking about expanding its daily “Café des idées”, a place for debates in the heart of the Saint-Louis cloister and probably other places this year. During an unannounced press conference on June 24, Tiago Rodrigues, director of the Festival, recalled that he had to, in the name of Jean Vilar’s legacy and his personal history as a child of resistance fighters to the Salazarist dictatorship, call for a republican barrier.
Mobilizing energies
In a column published in Release A few days before the European elections, Tiago Rodrigues and the choreographer
