STORY
It's nothing less than the biggest theater festival in the world. As every year, the Palais de Pape and the city of Avignon will host, from July 4 to 23, tens of thousands of visitors (more than 150,000 last year), sixty pieces and no less than 400 meetings. you theatrical. But do you know the story of this global event? Dive into the origins of the Avignon Festival with our columnist Fabrice D'Almeida.
"As early as July 1947, Christian Zervos, an art gallery owner and René Char, the poet, had planned an exhibition in Avignon and asked their friend, Jean Vilar, to move a piece he had erected on the spot so that It took place on that date, and Vilar even exceeded their wishes and offered three shows in three different venues, including the Papal Palace Courtyard, and the three men convinced Communist mayor Georges Pons to launch the show. This week's theater is a success and since then the municipality has maintained what has become the great theater festival in the world.
Problem: the festival did not always get along with the power ...
Jean Vilar and his successors believed in the revolutionary theater, his ability to push the people to change the world. It was the great epoch of the Communist intellectuals, like Gerard Philippe, or left like Ariane Mnouchkhine. Avignon was thus in delicacy with the Gaullist power. But paradoxically, Vilar was also vilified by the extreme left in 1968, which disturbs the festival by not hesitating to compare it to the dictator Salazar.
Everything changes, however, with the alternation in 1981 ...
On July 10, 1981, the new President François Mitterrand goes to the festival. He is accompanied by a whole group of artists and stage people: Jean-Pierre Darras, Pierre Vaneck, Marcel Maréchal and Ariane Mnouchkhine were there. Jack Lang, the Minister of Culture, was the guide with Bernard Faivre of Steel, the president of the festival. Mitterrand had then confided to the journalists to have already come: in 1974, to see the captain shatters in the court of honor, after his defeat in the presidential election. Avignon lived its honeymoon with power.
With Mitterrand's successors, things are changing. But Avignon has nonetheless remained a political festival.
Chirac and Sarkozy did not go in big pushes. But François Hollande has returned to the Mitterrandian gesture. President Macron is not indifferent to the festival, he took theater classes with a certain Brigitte Trogneux. And indeed, Olivier Py, the director of the festival, received the legion of honor, in the presence of the first lady last February at the Ministry of Culture. Today the festival is always at the heart of power.