Avignon hosts the 77th annual Festival d`Avignon

Avignon hosts the 77th annual Festival d`Avignon, the main theater show in France and one of the most important theater forums in Europe. Since this year it has been headed by the Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues. From Avignon – Esther Steinbock.

The performance of Anna Teresa De Kersmaeker is invited to a quarter of the ninth evening. The strange time is explained simply: “Waiting” should begin even in full daylight, and end exactly at the moment when complete darkness has not yet come, but twilight is already blurring the contours of the courtyard of the former Celestine monastery, and the figures of dancers, and, it seems, even the sounds of ancient music performed by the Cour de Coeur ensemble. Eight dancers, middle-aged concentrated people in black clothes, do not tell any stories for an hour and a half. With their harsh, even suffering plasticity, they do not invite the viewer to pleasure. They seem – this association is legitimate in the monastery courtyard – they perform a certain ritual of daily farewell to sunlight, a plastic prayer invented by themselves, in which, nevertheless, there is nothing more humility than dignity and self-will.

The masterpiece of Anna Teresa De Kersmaeker arrived in Avignon, one might say, for a belated encore. The premiere of “Waiting” took place as much as 13 years ago in the same place. In general, it is not in the rules of a serious festival practice to bring old performances, and even the same ones that once already had success here. The festival must take risks, create and discover something new. But, firstly, at the Avignon Festival it is really customary to proudly appeal to one’s own history, and secondly, the new director of the Festival d`Avignon, the Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues, had to include something in the program that would definitely be a success (his possible fears about everything else were not unfounded). The appearance of Rodrigues, a director of note, but by no means a major one, at the head of the most important cultural institution in France was a surprise for everyone – probably, the authorities just wanted to refute the common ideas about the xenophobia of the French elite. In addition, choosing a foreigner is a good way to avoid a fight between “ours”. In addition, according to rumor, one famous French actress who recently worked with Rodrigues managed to be at the right time at the right ears and put in a decisive word.

The very first festival of the new director was overshadowed by a scandal: a few weeks before the start, one of the alleged highlights of the program, the performance of the Polish master Christian Lupa “Emigrants”, was canceled. At the Comédie de Genève theater, where the rehearsals were going on, a typical “case of our time” happened – the director was accused of rude treatment of the technical staff, activists and the press raised a noise on duty, as a result of which the stage of the city theater of Avignon, the second most important after the Cour d’honneur of the Papal Palace of the festival site, was bare right in the middle of the festival. Tiago Rodrigues did not find anything better than to close the hole with his own performance, but the same Geneva theater, which, of course, turned out to be convenient for the Avignon festival. As a result, instead of Lupa’s performance based on the novel by Winfried Georg Sebald, the audience watched the documentary performance “Until Impossible”, made by Rodrigues based on conversations with three dozen employees of the International Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders. The conversation on stage is about the refugee camps, their management and how people work face to face with other people’s grief, death and suffering. The topic is important, relevant and serious, but Rodrigues did not come up with any new approaches to it and did not impress with any theatrical techniques. Unless, of course, one is amazed by the presence of a vital musician-percussionist on the stage and the design in the form of a huge multi-headed tent-tent, which in the finale soars into the stage heights as a kind of cover over the suffering.

Perhaps this performance was important for Rodrigues – on the eve of the festival, he made many statements that the Festival d`Avignon should be aware of all the challenges of the time and respond to them not only with discussions, but also with the content of the poster. In fact, there are not many performances in the program where the current global agenda sticks out. One of the private stories is in the play “Confessions” by the young British director Alexander Zeldin, one of those who have loudly declared themselves in the past few years. Zeldin made it based on conversations with his mother. Confessions is her story before the boy who later became director was born. Seemingly unremarkable ordinary life situations at first add up to a purely realistic narrative. And only with the course of the performance, a special stage language gradually appears in it, because memories come to life, as if under the supervision of the heroine herself, emerging from the auditorium and looking at her past with us. Zeldin’s manner can be partly compared with the aesthetics of Robert Lepage: the external plot, strung on life itself, is completely banal, but in the light transformations of the actors, in the technical shifting of the set design, in mild humor, wisdom and sadness and a unique feeling of the inexorable flow of time suddenly appear. No rational conclusions can be drawn from this sensation, but in good theater it can be felt with trepidation at the tips of one’s fingers.