78th edition

Why look for the words ?

We are often asked why we make this Festival. Why do we still do it, ever since its foundation by Jean Vilar in 1947, at a time when society was looking for the words to relearn to live together after the Second World War, Nazi occupation, the Holocaust, resistance and liberation? Why do we make this Festival, generation after generation, like a treasure passed on through time? Why do we still organise today this celebration of the performing arts, in a world threatened by wars, inequalities, the climate crisis, and the rise of extremism, demagoguery, and misinformation? We are a festival of creation fighting for the freedom of artists to look for words, sounds, gestures, and images to talk about and live in this world. We believe that the encounter between artists and spectators looking for the words together is a cultural public service in Europe more necessary than ever. That encounter is a vital moment of discovery of the unknown, of awakening of the senses, of love of difference, of debate about the challenges of our times, of imagining other possible worlds. We demand the right to celebrate looking for the words together because while art is not a guarantee of happiness, it increases our chances of finding it. We love the performing arts, and we share that love with our audience. And this combative love must be celebrated.

Tiago Rodrigues, Director of the Festival d'Avignon, April 2024

What are the dates of the Festival d'Avignon?

The Festival d'Avignon will take place from June 29 to July 21, 2024.

The 78th edition is :

• 23 days of Festival

• 35 shows and 2 exhibitions

• 29 creations in 2024, including 21 at the Festival d'Avignon

• 219 performances

• Over 300 events (shows, meetings, readings, debates and screenings)

• The Festival d'Avignon program is :

• 38 artists, with absolute parity

More than half of the guest artists are new to the Festival d'Avignon:

• One guest language: Spanish

• A associate artist: Boris Charmatz

• Pièce commune - Volksstück: a show touring 16 venues in and around Avignon - Une Ombre vorace by Mariano Pensotti

• Transmission impossible: A project by the Festival d'Avignon, the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès and Mathilde Monnier

See the artistic program

The Festival d'Avignon program also includes :

Encounters and debates at the Café des idées in the Cloître Saint-Louis

Professional meetings

Reading cycles:

• Fictions France Culture

• Ça va, ça va le monde with RFI

• Talents Adami Théâte with Spain's Centro Dramático Nacional

• Le Souffle d'Avignon with Avignon Scenes

Screenings:

• Les Territoires cinématographiques with Avignon's Utopia cinemas

• Histoires de transmission with Arte

And more:

• Les Belles Heures des auteurs with Artcena, France Culture and La Maison Jean Vilar: a festive event to explore today's dramatic writing.

• A program of shows, readings and exhibitions at the Chartreuse-CNES in Villeneuve lez Avignon as part of the 51es rencontre(s) d'été.

• Exhibitions at the Collection Lambert

• A program of shows, the Côté Livre Festival and various meetings at La Maison Jean Vilar.

Boris Charmatz

There are artists whose presence at the Festival d’Avignon takes on a particular significance, resonating with the programme so much that it infuses the spirit of an edition. Starting from 2024, we have decided to manifest this artistic complicity that was already present, and which reinvents itself differently every year. In Avignon, every sentence, every gesture is a dialogue with our history. Boris Charmatz is among those artists who have left their mark on the recent history of the Festival. As a French choreographer and the new artistic director of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, his position at this crossroads seems symbolic of the challenges facing Europe today: in a space where diversity and the circulation and blending of artistic languages must be maintained, how can one embrace one’s heritage while continuing to create?

As a associate artist, Boris Charmatz is present with the public from the very first to the very last minute of the Festival, to develop a multi-faceted project including performances, a choreographic workshop, meetings and screenings.

Boris Charmatz events during the Festival

2 shows, 1 workshop

CERCLES, an open-air workshop
June 29, 30 and July 1, 6-8pm
Free entry

See the workshop page

Liberté Cathédrale
July 5, 6, 8 and 9 at 9:30pm

See show page

Forever, (Immersion in Pina Bausch's Café Müller)
July 14, 15, 17, 18, 20 and 21 from 1pm to 8pm

See show page

Boris Charmatz's choice at Territoires cinématographiques

Ciné-Marathon Pina Bausch
July 16, 10 a.m.-11.30 p.m.

In partnership with Tanztheater Wuppertal and the Pina Bausch Foundation, Utopia cinemas program films by and about the choreographer, with many previously unseen rehearsal archives.

See the screening page

A meeting at the Café des idées

A friendly coffee with Boris Charmatz
July 7, 10:30 a.m.-1 p.m.

Boris Charmatz invites architect Elizabeth Diller and philosophers Emma Bigé and Emanuele Coccia for a conversation exploring the connections between art, philosophy and architecture.

See the meeting page

Spanish - Español

Spanish is the guest language of this 78th edition. By inviting a language rather than a country or a continent, we choose to view the world as connected by languages rather than divided by borders. At a time where the rhetoric of division is on the rise, in a Europe where the circulation of goods is freer than that of bodies, languages remain spaces of freedom: there is no need for a passport to write in another language. The idea of languages is part of the DNA of the Festival. Avignon has always been a festival of words, searching for the right words, where everyone can use words to play or debate. In the late 1960s, Avignon opened up to the world when it became an international festival, and thus a privileged space of exploration. Language – through the possibility of translation – is an essential vector of the discovery of the other. To invite Spanish to the Festival d’Avignon is to recognise the richness of the Spanish-speaking world and its importance in the field of the performing arts. It also means listening to its history, to the collective or intimate stories carried by its artists. Beyond Spanishlanguage shows, which represent 30% of the programme, Spanish permeates this entire edition through encounters, readings, debates, screenings… On national and international territories, language outlines the edges of a community which includes residents, tourists, and migrants. To welcome this Spanish-speaking audience to the Festival, all communication materials for this 78th edition are trilingual – French, English, and Spanish.

programme for Spanish speakers

El español es la lengua invitada en esta 78ª. edición. Al invitar a una lengua y no a un país o a un continente, elegimos mirar el mundo como un lugar unido por las lenguas y no dividido por las fronteras. En una época en que crecen los discursos de aislamiento, en una Europa donde hay más libertad para que circulen las mercancías que las personas, las lenguas siguen siendo espacios de libertad: no necesitamos un pasaporte para escribir en otra lengua. Esta idea de las lenguas forma parte del ADN del Festival. Avignon siempre ha sido un festival de palabras, que busca sus palabras, donde la gente utiliza las palabras para actuar o hablar. Cuando a finales de 1960 se internacionalizó, Avignon se abrió al mundo y se convirtió en un lugar privilegiado de exploración.

La lengua – gracias a la traducción – es un vector esencial para descubrir al otro. Invitar al español al Festival d’Avignon significa reconocer hoy la riqueza del mundo hispanohablante y su importancia en las artes escénicas. Significa también escuchar su historia, y las historias colectivas o personales que cuentan sus artistas. Además de los espectáculos en español, que representan un 30% de la programación, el español inundará toda la edición a través de encuentros, lecturas, debates y proyecciones… Tanto a escala nacional como internacional, la lengua dibuja los contornos de una comunidad que incluye tanto a residentes, como a turistas y emigrantes. Para recibir al público hispanohablante en el Festival, todos los soportes de comunicación de esta 78ª. edición están en francés, inglés y español.

Programación para hispanohablantes

How do I get there? How to choose? How to prepare?

Coming to the Festival d'Avignon for the first time is an experience you'll remember for a long time, a unique adventure that can be enjoyed by people of all ages. We want the Festival to welcome as wide an audience as possible, accompanying them in their questions, doubts and desires, in an approach that encourages curiosity, discovery and openness to the world around us.

See shows accessible for the first time

The "First Time" booklet

Designed for everyone, the notebook lets you immerse yourself in the history and experience of the Festival, and discover the themes of the shows through games, quizzes and practical tips. The booklet is available at all Festival venues and can be downloaded in PDF format.

A project by the Festival d'Avignon, the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès and Mathilde Monnier

How to pass on the performing arts? That’s the question asked by this programme, conceived in 2024 as an agora with the Hermès Foundation and Mathilde Monnier. Transmission Impossible brings together fifty young French and international artists—most of them recipients of a Hermès Foundation grant—to experience the Festival d’Avignon as a laboratory of reflection thanks to shows, rehearsals, and encounters. Accompanied by author and choreographer Cristina Morales, filmmaker Patric Chiha, and playwright Stéphane Bouquet, Mathilde Monnier invites those young artists to transform fluid thought into performances during sessions open to the public. Aimed at opening new artistic horizons, Transmission impossible calls on a new multidisciplinary team every year to provide ever more perspectives and research angles. 

Transmission Impossible es un proyecto de inmersión, de intercambio y de investigación dentro del Festival d’Avignon para 50 artistas franceses e internacionales de las artes vivas. Los participantes se sumergirán en el Festival y se impregnarán de una edición-laboratorio para inventar el mañana.  

Interview with Olivier Fournier, Mathilde Monnier and Tiago Rodrigues

About the project

Transmission Impossible is an immersion, exchange, and research project for young artists and performing arts students taking place within the Festival d’Avignon. This postgraduate project brings together many young talents of live arts supported by of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès as part of its Artists in the Community programme, wich aims to promote access to the performing arts professions with particular attention to the issue of equal opportunities. Under the coordination of Mathilde Monnier, the participants will experience the Festival d’Avignon as a space of learning and artistic experimentation, thanks to workshops and masterclasses. It will also be an agora of the gaze, where these young professional artists will be given privileged access to shows, rehearsals, and encounters with the artists of this year’s edition of the Festival. Each group of 25 participants will embark on a week-long adventure, as part of a group made up of people from all over France and from other countries and continents, and will be given the opportunity to take part in open to the public and to professionals performances.

Concept note

After completing their training, young artists from all over France and abroad are invited to immerse themselves in the vastness of the Avignon nights, as if in a cauldron of endless possibilities: to see shows together, to shadow artists at work on extraordinary stages, to talk to scenographers, to lighting engineers, to strangers, or even to visit the kitchen of the Festival. Perhaps something can be transmitted this way, not as organised knowledge, but through happy accidents and unexpected interactions within this endless well of know-how, experiences, and tools that is the Festival d’Avignon. Transmission Impossible, not because nothing can ever be shared of the history of forms, but because we are dreaming here of the possibility that aesthetic ideas could follow explosive and unexpected roads—it was impossible, yet it happened. So here’s the rule of the game: to offer young artists the opportunity to come up with their own way of being spectators of this machine-festival (both on-and offstage). Then to give them a chance to share the way they feel, understand, and react, as part of a work-out in the Église des Célestins, which will open its doors every weekend for this project to offer a moment of performance, exchange… and maybe transgression. Project led by four artists : Stéphane Bouquet, Patric Chiha, Cristina Garcia Morales, Mathilde Monnier

Mathilde Monnier, January 2024

From June 29 to July 21 at the Saint-Louis Cloister
Free admission - Coffee and light refreshments are available.

The Café des idées is a venue where leading figures in the fields of literature, the performing arts, and research come daily to discuss and exchange ideas. Debates, conferences, workshops, and broadcasts constantly enliven this place which embodies the spirit of the Festival d’Avignon: a space of sharing and discovery, open to all.

Debates and meetings

A few meetings from the Café des idées:

• La matinale du Festival d'Avignon, a regular event inviting the artists behind the Festival to answer Zineb Soulaimani's questions about the shows on the program.

• Making Waves Avignon: a radio program that gives young people the microphones, hosted live by young people from Bobigny, Noisy-le-Sec, Avignon and Annecy, accompanied by the Making Waves team.

• Les Midis de la culture with France Culture: united by their shared love of art and creation, artists, journalists and researchers discuss the latest cultural news.

• A screening of 15 mini-films in the courtyard of the Cloître Saint-Louis by the Formiga Atomica company.

• Justice and criticism, in conversation with Christiane Taubira

• Conversation with Enrique Vila Matas

• Conversation with Marie NDiaye and Delphine de Vigan

• And other meetings and debates with numerous partners...

Discover the whole Café des idées program

The Avignon Festival Bookshop

Books by Café des idées participants are available directly from the courtyard of the Saint-Louis cloister, where a "flying bookshop" has been set up. Otherwise, the entire bookshop is housed in the Maison Jean Vilar, a spacious, calm and temperate setting, offering an exceptional choice of over 3,000 references dedicated to the shows and debates that animate Avignon. The collection of plays and essays on theater is extended to dance, circus, puppetry and the performing arts as a whole.

The Festival d'Avignon bar

June 29 to July 20, 7:30 pm to 2 am
Free admission between 7:30 pm and 10 pm, subject to availability. By invitation from 10pm.

The Mahabharata owes its name to the iconic show that Peter Brook, invited in 1985 by Alain Crombecque, created for the opening of the Carrière de Boulbon. Historically frequented by artists and partners of the Festival d'Avignon, the bar has been open to all since last year. Everyone is welcome to have a drink and a bite to eat, and on certain evenings to party!

From 10pm onwards, the evenings of July 4, 10 and 18 will be accessible by dated invitation only. Please also note that access to the Mahabharata will be very restricted on July 6 and 12.