Billet
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Both a bubble of entertainment and a mirror of the world, the theatrical event cannot be removed from the singular political moment that is shaking France. For directors and critics alike, surpassing oneself is essential.
The “rocker”, Thomas Legrand warned us in his editorial on Sunday, June 30. The “tipping point” that he describes as a dramatic perspective; yet if we shift, here is a beautiful word, a word of theater. We think about it on this first day of July, as we head straight to the South, as we head straight towards, if not catastrophe, at least the unknown, and towards an Avignon Festival that constitutes both an inside and an outside of what is agitating the country – both an enclosure of entertainment, and a nerve center of tensions. The Festival as a complicated place, which since its foundation claims to be a sounding board, and which, at the same time, remains in many ways a place cut off from the world.
In this exemplarily fractured place, how can we think about what is happening? How can we get out of this other shift which has occupied the artistic and intellectual elites in recent days – between the sad option of strategic withdrawal (defended for example by Ariane Mnouchkine), and the enthusiastic but perhaps vain option of engaged combat ( claimed by the director of the Festival, Tiago Rodrigues, who
