Festival d'Avignon 2024

Festival d'Avignon 2024 : Tiago Rodrigues was able to find the words to (us) say it

The FabricA room was as usual full, the Avignon public eager to discover the program of the 78th edition of the Avignon Festival unveiled by its director Tiago Rodrigues, festival that could have been sacrificed because of the Olympic Games but which will finally take place one week in advance, from June 29 to July 21, 2 days more than in 2023
Tiago Rodrigues did not surprise us when he started his speech by saying: » Hello my name is Tiago Rodrigues and I work at the Festival d'Avignon» a way for him to remind that he is one of the 750 employees employed in July but that the Festival works all year because it takes time and human resources to prepare a party, the Festival of Living Art.

Why party in the midst of the chaos of the world?
Why do this festival again and again since 1947, founding gesture of Jean Vilar?
The answer is in the editorial title of the program “Chercher les mots”, it is simply borrowed from the response of a spectator who came for the first time to the Festival d’Avignon and was asked to define this experience. Tiago Rodrigues' team took this answer «I look for words» to affirm the support of artists «who seek words, sounds, gestures and images to say and inhabit the world». Why this festival? to search together for words to speak about “a world threatened by war, inequality, extremism and the climate emergency”
A festival of promises and creations
More days and fewer works presented mark an evolution of the model: it is a question of supporting and accompanying the artists in production, to offer more performances therefore more gauge. The average place per show was 2800 in 2023, it will be 3500 in 2024.

The festival is:
23 days
21 places in Avignon
15 communes
37 artistic projects including 35 shows and 2 exhibitions
More than 300 meetings: cinema; debate, exhibitions, reading, concerts, training
219 performances
121,500 seats on sale
83% of creations with more than half in world premiere
Absolute parity between artists
70% produced or co-produced with the Festival d'Avignon
51% theatre, 49% dance, circus, music
and a poster of ochre and light that invites discovery in the heat of the South.

The artist accomplice, the choreographer Boris Charmatz will be present throughout this edition
It will present 3 projects: a restitution of workshops «Circles» with the challenge of making dance in a circle, amateurs or professionals, on the grass of the Stade Bagatelle of the Ile de la Barthelasse in Avignon. In this same place he will also propose "Liberté Cathédrale" danced and sung by the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pinau Baush ( of which he is the director since 2022) and the dancers of Terrain. He will also be at La FabricA with Forever after the iconic Café Muller by Pinau Baush. The piece originally lasts 40min, it is here proposed in a version of 7h seen as a repetition played in loop on Purcell in order to create another relationship to time and space. Boris Charmatz mischievously adds that the time required for this immersion would ideally be 2 hours for the viewer… before he leaves… if he wishes.