Tiago Rodrigues entrusts the opening of the Festival d'Avignon to Julie Deliquet and Bintou Dembélé

The official poster of the 77th Festival d'Avignon which will take place from 5 to 25 July 2023. © Festival d'Avignon

Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow

4 mn

The new director of the Festival d'Avignon, the Portuguese Tiago Rodrigues, unveiled this Wednesday, April 5, the 2023 edition which will take place from July 5 to 25. The program includes 44 shows, including 33 creations. 55% of projects are led by women. The two shows that will open the Festival are also entrusted to creators.

Advertising

Read more

« 

Theatre is the living art we so desperately need ", concluded Tiago Rodrigues the presentation of the 2023 edition of the Festival d'Avignon this Wednesday, April 5 at the FabricA, in Avignon. Apart from the revolt against the pension reform, its programming ticks practically all the boxes of current debates: inclusion, racism, colonialism, violence against women, ecology, poverty, the war in Ukraine, the climate emergency...

Julie Deliquet at the Cour d'honneur of the Palais des papes

On July 5, Julie Deliquet will enter the history of the Festival with Welfare as one of the very few women to be able to face the legendary Cour d'honneur, this "springboard to the future" of contemporary theatre. Known for her film adaptations at the Comédie-Française or the Théâtre de l'Odéon, the director and director of the Théâtre Gérard Philipe was inspired this time by a film shot in a social center in New York by the American filmmaker Frederick Wiseman. "The Palace of the Popes will be transformed – ephemerally – into a Social Assistance Center, it becomes the setting for a poem on vulnerability and human solidarity," warned Tiago Rodrigues. And the director explained that "for a day, we will observe workers, listen to the story of applicants who come to tell their lives or even totally invent their lives, to recover the little dignity they have left and a place in society.

But before the evening show at the Pope's Palace, the 77th edition will start in the street, with Bintou Dembélé. The French choreographer, a hip-hop legend mixing hip-hop, krump and voguing, had moved the lines of contemporary dance and even the Opera Garnier when she presented Les Indes galantes in 2019. The strolling performance G.R.O.O.V.E "is a three-hour immersion in my artistic universe that puts in tension street cultures and the colonial fact ... I invite everyone to celebrate through different modes: baroque, concert, dancefloor, museum," she said in a video statement.

Tiego Rodrigues, new director of the Festival d'Avignon, during the online presentation of the 2023 edition. © Festival d'Avignon 2023

Philippe Quesne at the Boulbon Quarry

The reopening of the Boulbon Quarry, a place that has become mythical by Peter Brook's Mahabharata, but closed for financial reasons, is one of the sensations brought by the new director to "affirm Avignon as a place of great and singular artistic adventures". The French director Philippe Quesne celebrated his Garden of Delights, inspired by the famous painting by Hieronymus Bosch, a highly anticipated show "between medieval bestiary, ecological science fiction and contemporary western".

With 75% of new names in the programming, the desire for renewal is palpable, but the only real innovation presented by Rodrigues is probably his decision to invite each year to the festival a language that will cross the entire edition for "a world organized in languages that connect peoples". In 2023, the guest language will be English, because "behind this dominance of English, hides a phenomenon of impoverishment of English, which hides an enormous wealth ...

Who is afraid of the English language?

In 2023, Tim Crouch, one of the greatest artists in English theatre, will make his France premiere with two plays, including An Oak Tree, which toured around the world. Elevator Repair Service, one of the most original and fascinating companies on the North American continent, will perform in Avignon a theatrical restitution of a debate on the rights and freedoms of black Americans. Not to mention the German director Susanne Kennedy presenting with the visual artist Markus Selg Angela (a strange loop), a show in English on post-humanism.

Compared to his predecessor Olivier Py, Rodrigues' presentation seems less focused on political issues and more on social challenges. The first foreign artist to direct the world's largest theatre festival has above all displayed a very practical approach. The opening of ticket sales is brought forward by several weeks (April 7 on the Internet), and an offer of 12,000 additional tickets is supposed to attract even more young audiences, a target declared a priority by Tiago Rodrigues. Its "First time" initiative is intended to allow 5,000 young people to come to the Festival for the first time in 2023.

Newsletter Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox

I subscribe

Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application

Read on on the same topics:

• Theatre
• France
• Our selection

On the same subject

Maintenance

"Violetta", "La Traviata" between hospital and opera

Opera / Dance / Culture

"Les Indes galantes", a hip hop reinterpretation of Bintou Dembélé