Avignon Festival ends

The 77th Festival d’Avignon has ended in Avignon. By tradition, many performances of his program were played outside the walls of the old city. In search of art Esther Steinbock together with other spectators, she rode through the natural beauties in the vicinity of the festival center.

For a long time, the Festival d’Avignon does not fit within the boundaries of the old city – it lacks not only the Cour d’honneur of the Papal Palace, where the festival was born 76 years ago, and the stage of the Avignon Opera House, but also numerous religious and educational institutions, chapels, monastery cloisters, gymnasiums and museum courtyards. A dozen years ago, the “Factory” appeared, a modern transformer site, located, however, a good kilometer from the walls of old Avignon, at the same time they mastered the theater building of the neighboring town of Vedene. It surprises no one if a performance is scheduled in the neighboring town of Villeneuve, on the other side of the Rhone. And it has long become a tradition that some performances are held at various natural sites far from the city, where spectators are delivered by shuttle buses. All my life they were free, but the management of Tiago Rodrigues decided to earn some extra money, so now you need to buy separate tickets for transport, which immediately turned out to be in short supply and led to logistical hassle. Therefore, many considered it wise to refuse to visit the many hours of performance “This remains my joy”, which also begins at five in the morning and takes place in the vicinity of the town of Barbétan.

But it was impossible to miss “General Landscapes”, also seven hours long and also played “unknown anywhere” – this is a new project of Stefan Kägi, the most famous member of the Rimini Protocol trio, and his current co-author Carolina Barno, inexhaustible in inventions. The project consists of seven separate mini-shows played outdoors in different locations on a hill above the village of Pujo, which offers breathtaking views of the surroundings. So in any case, the theme of the unity of man with nature (and hence alienation from it) becomes the main one.

Stefan Kagi himself came up with the first part of this heptology – the audience listens to it in headphones, lying down on a hillside, under the trees. Most of the subsequent episodes are made not only under the supervision of Kagi, but also in direct proportion to the aesthetics of the “Rimini Protocol”. The Portuguese Sofia Diaz and Victor Roriz again force the audience to put on headphones and split into two groups in the clearing, so that one of them becomes spectators and the other “actors”, then vice versa. In headphones, wise and calm voices broadcast about life and death, external and internal, eternal and momentary – almost like in Kegi’s Remote X project, which has already become a textbook; this is his, so to speak, suburban version. Frenchwoman Emily Rousset sits the audience in front of a vineyard and indulges in a discussion of agricultural problems in the EU countries – with the participation of a real farmer on a tractor, a lawyer and a bioacoustic specialist. That is, the director acts in the spirit of the equally famous performances of “Rimini Protocol” with the participation not of actors, but of “everyday experts”, bearers of life experience.

The most memorable fragment of a rather exhausting project, admittedly, for the public, turned out to be a joint “dance” of two Italian performers, Chiara Bersani and Marco D’Agostin, one of whom is an immobilized person in a wheelchair, and the second one is freely moving. The second slowly and gradually removes the first from the carriage and, in motion, seems to merge with him into some kind of single entity flowing inside its own duality. The plastic sketch, accompanied by music and against the backdrop of the divine beauty of the landscape, had an undeniable therapeutic effect. And the etude with VR glasses was also not bad, putting on them, the viewer seemed to slowly rise in a balloon exactly above the place where he was standing, and then just as slowly descended back.

If Pujo Hill became a theater, most likely for the first and last time, then the Boulbon Quarry is one of the most respected venues of the Festival d’Avignon, dating back to those ancient times when Peter Brook showed his legendary Mahabharata here. This year, a huge oval recess, surrounded by a high cliff, was given to director Philip Quen for his new play, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Ken is celebrating this year the 30th anniversary of his own independent theater company, Studio Vivarium, and the new performance has become, as they say, his creative report – it seems to “summ up”, weave the main motives and techniques of his past performances, strange, visual, unhurried infused with specific humor.

Like Bosch’s triptych of the same name, which inspired the director, Ken’s performance can be interpreted in many ways. A strange company of people, arriving by bus in some kind of dead end space, is trying to get comfortable here, reassemble themselves and establish new connections. Sometimes it looks like slow dancing, sometimes like a cabaret, where meditative inhibition and musical numbers are mixed, long silences and fragmentary texts, everyday and pseudoscientific – Ken speaks either about nothing, or about everything at once. Of course, we are talking about people who are lost, but still looking for a way out. And here the Boulbon quarry plays a unique role – when the director arranges a theatrical storm under the darkening sky, you willy-nilly cringe: didn’t the real end of the world find us here, together with these charming and confused comedians? It is interesting how Philip Ken is going to reproduce this effect in the future – after all, the tour of the performance is planned not in nature reserves, but in ordinary European theaters, with rooftops and box stages. Nothing, he is very talented, he will probably come up with something unexpected.