Every month from September to March, the Festival invites the public to La FabricA to meet artists from the upcoming edition. One month = one name = one world = one place… A way to prepare for and project oneself into the future, to discover a new way of thinking and an artistic form in the making, and to explore new questions all the better to dream about July.
Encounters Artists-Public
The Festival is a place where artists whose worlds and aesthetics are wildly different can come together, where the avant-garde meets the classics. This challenging exploration of the various forms of the performing arts can only happen thanks to the complicity of the Festival’s audience. To allow them to feel closer and more involved with the Festival, we regularly invite artists to Avignon to dream up their upcoming creations.
Encounters at La FabricA
Dialogues between artists and spectators
Reviving a tradition begun with the “rencontres du Verger,” these events allow spectators to meet and interact with artists programmed at the Festival d’Avignon. Since 2004, the Ceméa have served as hosts and moderators to those discussions, allowing the spectators to speak directly to the artists without critical mediation. Every year, as part of the Workshops of Thought on the Louis Pasteur campus of the Université d’Avignon, over a dozen artistic teams come to talk about their shows and listen to individual reactions, providing audiences with diverse points of view from directors, choreographers, stage managers, performers, etc.
Those events take place every day (except on days of rest) at 4:30 p.m., and on Saturdays at 11 a.m. Between 50 and 350 people come every day to talk with artistic teams.
Faith and Culture panels
In 1966, Jean Vilar and Father Chave, a worker-priest from Avignon, organised the first Faith and Culture panel, to shine a light on the deep questions artists ask themselves about the human condition. Father Chave continued exploring spiritual and metaphysical questions with the artists of the Festival d’Avignon until 2010, when a group of priests from Avignon and all over France took over. Dieudonné Niangouna, Arthur Nauzyciel, Ambre Senatore, Wajdi Mouawad, Hubert Colas, DeLaVallet Bidiefono, Romeo Castellucci, Jean-François Matignon, Ali Chahrour, Raimund Hogue, Claire Tabouret, and many other artists have come to talk about their approach not only as artists, but as men and women, in the beautiful Chapelle de l’Oratoire, rue Joseph Vernet in Avignon.
Between 50 and 80 people attend those panels every Tuesday and Friday in July.
