Avignon, un rêve que nous faisons tous (Avignon, a dream we all have)

The 2003 edition of the Festival marks the end of an era, yet at the same time points us in a new direction. The Maison Jean Vilar and the Avignon Festival, with their partner, the French National Library, to mark this phase with an exhibition punctuated by the outstanding moments of a shared history. The Festival has always been able to continue even in times of artistic or political crises, during disputes or when its director changes... Who today does not recognise the necessity of a joint reflection on how better to define the responsibility of our theatre in a world that changes so violently ? This is where we have to look to find why Jean Vilar resigned for the first time in 1953. We will still find the intuition of the years from 1963 to 1968, and a succession of personal denial and opening. For the first time, we will consider the world of Paul Puaux, who had said that no-one succeeds Jean Vilar. The first period under Bernard Faivre d'Arcier (1980-1984), consisting of rifts and recurrence from the great ceremony that was Ariane Mnouchkine's production of Shakespeare's Richard II to the question of Live and Artifice, was a prelude to the poetical and nocturnal episode under Alain Crombecque (1985-1992), marked by the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, directed by Peter Brook and Paul Claudel's, Le Soulier de Satin (The Satin Shoe). Bernard Faivre d'Arcier's second period (1993-2003), increasingly open to Europe and to the rest of the world, has it explored new paths of concern ?
Jacques Téphany