France Culture is the leading French radio station for actors, writers and other artists. At the Avignon Festival, France Culture sets out to advertise its commissioning policy for new works and for that policy to be appreciated. Discoveries, emotion, voyages into imagination and sound. Mixed cultures - rap, concrete music, song. Political scripts, poetic scripts, comedy, drama - every afternoon actors will be there to make you laugh or cry with as yet unpublished texts and stage adaptations of stories. Isabelle Huppert and Jacques Lassalle, two big names in French theatre, assist France Culture in its pursuit to maintain its heritage work in honour the memory of Nathalie Sarraute who would be celebrating her one hundredth birthday this summer. France Culture also takes you for a whole night of Odyssey, in the company of the Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique.
MUSIC
• Pierre Henry
> Première
Journal de mes sons (A Diary of my Sounds)
with the voice of Florence Delay
Commissioned by France Culture
JULY 7 23H00 COUR DU MUSÉE CALVET
This recently published text is woven with a special alchemy of sound from the magician of concrete music. He has a following of young people, a new generation of fans of electronic music. It's a comeback for Pierre Henry at Avignon where his music provided the background for the 1967 performance of Maurice Béjart's Messe pour le Temps Présent, in collaboration with Michel Colombier.
• Anna Karina and Katerine
JULY 8 23H00 COUR DU MUSÉE CALVET
A concert with the mythical heroine of the films of Jean-Luc Godard, alongside the malicious, nonchalant and trendy Katerine, one of the most successful of the new wave of the Chanson française (typical French bistro songs). The young Danish girl arrived in Paris at the age of 17 and became a model for Chanel, and went on to a film career that made her a household name in France. Anna Karina played not only in Godard's cult films - Le Petit Soldat, Une Femme est une Femme and Pierrot le Fou, but also with Rivette, Visconti, Fassbinder, Cukor, Varda, Schlöndorff and Ruiz. In 1998, she played a role in Ingmar Bergman's play, After the Rehearsal. For her concert tour 2000, Katerine wrote a dozen new songs for Anna.
• Rap by women
Les Messagères : Lynda and Chaharzad Bams, Lady Laistee with DJs and backing vocalists
JULY 9 23H00 COUR DU MUSÉE CALVET
The idea for a female rap evening came suddenly and impetuously after an encounter with two young Algerian girls who used rap music to express their hopes and fears about the future of their country. Rap, a poetic form of expression for some young people also has its messengers in France - messengers of the heart, of modernity, of solidarity. Lynda and Chaharzad, have come from Algiers, where after the riots of 1988, rap began to replace raï. Lynda is 20 and Chaharzad 19 ; one is a secretary, the other is a student, both of them live in a downtown area called Hussein Dey and they sing in Arab as well as in French. Bams is Franco-Cameroonian and a hip hop performer. Bams is a reference to the singer's tribal origins, "Bamileke". She is multi-talented being at the same time rapper, actress, maths graduate and athletics champion ! Lady Laistee, was born in Saint-Claude, Basse-Terre (Guadeloupe), and grew up in the suburbs in France. Today, she is the Queen of the young French-speaking female rappers.
• Northern India : Imrat Khan
The Music Salon
Imrat Khan, sitar, Wajahat Khan, sarod
Shafaat Khan, tabla
Concert followed by a screening of the film
The Music Salon (1958)
by Satyajit Ray, with Imrat Khan
JULY 16 23H00 COUR DU MUSÉE CALVET
Pierre Toureille decided to associate the music and cinema of the classical tradition of Northern India, and it's an evening that invites us to indulge in a little meditation.
LA FICTION
• Berg et Beck
by Robert Bober
with François Clavier
directed by Jacques Taroni
JULY 10 COUR DU MUSÉE CALVET
11H00 run-through in public / 19h00 public reading
Adaptation of the novel by Robert Bober himself, composed of posthumous letters sent by Joseph Berg, a few years after the Second World War, to his childhood friend Henri Beck, one of the victims of the raid and rounding up of Jews at the Velodrome d'Hiver in Paris, in July 1942, and who died in the death camps. The poetry of the past and of the years of innocence cross paths with the horror of destiny, according to a faithful memory shadowed by remorse, in the impossible and necessary human tenderness of those who have been through the fury of time.
• Planches de salut / The Salvation Boards
by Ricardo Montserrat
A play for 2 to 4 players
(Distribution pending)
Directed by Jean Couturier
JULY 11 COUR DU MUSÉE CALVET
11H00 run-through in public / 19h00 public reading
This play was created in a writing workshop in an under-privileged area of Avignon. The theme of this play for two or four players is the way people living in areas that do not have a clear social identity portray themselves. Ricardo Montserrat asks questions that punctuate this experience. "What if we staged the difficulty of existing in a society where representation has been confiscated ? And what if we were to write a fiction through which we are reborn on stage ? And what if we created a language, a history, a country, a way of being, a "savoir-être", a "savoir-vivre", a "savoir" for survival and for death ?
• Sujet libre
Subject of your Choice
by Olivier Rolin
with Anouk Grinberg, Marc Betton
(distribution pending)
directed by Blandine Masson
JULY 12 COUR DU MUSÉE CALVET
11H00 run-through in public / 19h00 public reading
In a deserted bistrot in a small town, two characters are talking. He is a client passing through who seems to be what might be called an "intellectuel". She is from the countryside and is a waitress in the bistrot. They are talking for no particular reason, or rather to escape from the boring place they are in, from a boredom that they both feel but each in their own way, not shared. At first, they barely get on, but gradually, unexpected beauty reveals itself and mutual imaginings emerge. This mutual seduction or education comes about through a free use of words. From time to time, from now-here, a voice mumbles, in barely constructed language some of the hackneyed phrases of the day. This stereotypical voice, that sounds like that of the masters of today, is a non-character, an intermittent background noise. It attempts to confuse the meeting of a language from "below" and one from "above", the marriage (anarchic but possible, as in other times it was celebrated) between popular language and literary, if not poetic, language.
• Premier jour
by Erik Orsenna
cast: Bernard Bloch, Hervé Pierre,
Christine Fersen, Jérôme Robard
Nada Strancar, Denis Podalydès
Directed by Jacques Taroni
JULY 13 COUR DU MUSÉE CALVET
11H00 run-through in public / 19h00 public reading
At the Elysee Palace, a new President of the Republic replaces the old one. An usher plays the role of impassive observer on this day when a transfer of power is taking place. An imposter mother of the president, an image adviser, an over-the-top chairwoman of a support committee, a secretary general who packs his bags... these are the other characters in this republican comedy by Erik Orsenna that is always ironic, sometimes cynical, but never malevolent.
• Nathalie Sarraute aurait 100 ans / Nathalie Sarraute Would Be 100
Readings from Enfanceby Isabelle Huppert and Ich Sterbe et Le Gant retourné by Jacques Lassalle
Directed by Blandine Masson
JULY 14 COUR DU MUSÉE CALVET
11H00 run-through in public / 19h00 public reading
Nathalie Sarraute would be 100 years old this year. The words of her writing are often heard on radio programmes, either in programmes specifically produced for just that, or in works around her texts. Emotion and self-control that she always so admirably combined, will be at the centre of this evening performance that is a tribute to her.
• Le feu au lac / Fire on the Lake
by Roland Topor
with Bernadette Lafont, Bulle Ogier
Roland Bertin and James Thiérrée
directed by Jacques Taroni.
JULY 15 COUR DU MUSÉE CALVET
11H00 run-through in public / 19h00 public reading
Taking the case of a schizophrenic woman, to the point where two characters play her on stage to give free rein to their mutual hatred, as if they were two rival sisters, Roland Topor throws himself into a comical fantasy that is a sort of fable of our times. Doctor Gallus tries to cure the neuroses of this double-woman who is at the head of a cosmetics empire in Switzerland and whose erotic fantasies are aroused when the pizza delivery-boy rings the doorbell.
• L'Odyssée / The Odyssey
by Homer
Stage concept by Brigitte Jaques
with students from the "Conservatoire"
and three actors
and with the collaboration of Marcel Bozonnet.
Directed by Jean Couturier
JULY 17 COUR DU MUSÉE CALVET
16h00 to 07h00
A voyage through the night that begins in the middle of the afternoon and continues until the sun is in the sky again the following morning. When our time is more and more limited and formula-style "pre-packed" culture is winning the day, an extension of time becomes somewhat necessary and is a luxury that is being offered here by France Culture to its listeners as a modest form of resistance to the rushed behaviour patterns of our era. At the same time, this epic production is a sign of confidence in the actors of tomorrow.
Production
Production : France Culture