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 features 44 shows, including 33 premieres. 55% of the projects are led by women. The two shows that will open the Festival are also entrusted to creators.
“ Theater is this living art that we need so much “, concluded Tiago Rodrigues the presentation of the 2023 edition of the Festival d’Avignon this Wednesday, April 5 at 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 Court of Honor of the Palace of the Popes
On July 5, Julie Deliquet will enter with Welfare in the history of the Festival as one of the very rare women to be able to face the legendary Cour d’honneur, this “ springboard to the future of contemporary theatre. Known for her adaptations of films at the Comédie-Française or the Odéon theater, the director and director of the Gérard Philipe Theater was inspired this time by a film shot in a social center in New York by the filmmaker American Frederick Wiseman. “ The Palace of the Popes will be transformed – fleetingly – in the Center for Social Assistance, 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 stories of applicants who come to recount 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, legend of hip-hop mixing hip-hop, krump and voguing, had moved the lines of contemporary dance and even of the Opéra Garnier when she presented there in 2019 The gallant Indies. The performance walk GROOVE “ is a three-hour immersion in my artistic universe that puts street cultures and the colonial fact in tension… I invite everyone to celebrate through different modes: baroque, concert, dancefloor, museum », she claimed in a video statement.
Philippe Quesne at the Boulbon Quarry
The reopening of the Carrière de Boulbon, a place made legendary by the mahabharata by Peter Brook, but closed for financial reasons, is one of the sensations brought by the new director for ” affirm Avignon as a place of great and singular artistic adventures “. The French director Philippe Quesne celebrated his garden of delightsinspired 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 its decision to invite each year to the festival a language that will cross the entire edition to “ 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’s Afraid of the English Language?
In 2023, Tim Crouch, one of the greatest artists of English theater, will premiere in France with two plays, including An Oak Tree, touring around the world. Elevator Repair Service, one of the most original and fascinating companies on the North American continent, will perform a theatrical rendition of a debate on the rights and freedoms of black Americans in Avignon. Without forgetting the German director Susanne Kennedy presenting with the visual artist Markus Selg Angela (a strange loop)an English-language show about 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 lead the largest theater festival in the world has above all displayed a very practical approach. The opening of ticket sales has been 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. His initiative First time is intended to enable 5,000 young people to come to the Festival in 2023 for the first time.