Le vent souffle dans la Cour d'honneur

The Wind Blows in the Cour d'honneur captures the spirit of the Festival d'Avignon today: what the Festival brings into play each year, based on the link that connects the public and contemporary creation, the theatre and other arts, the performing arts and their political implications. At Avignon, we perhaps feel more than elsewhere this impression that a show can make you better, more capable of understanding and criticizing the world. History is there, a palimpsest presence that today makes two decisive moments re-emerge: 1947, the birth of the Festival founded by Jean Vilar, and 1967, the transformation of the Festival into a city-theatre with artists like Maurice Béjart and Jean-Luc Godard. But what we see on the screen, in Nicolas Klotz and Élisabeth Perceval's work, more resembles a cinema of creation that captures the essence of the Festival today in the stage work and words that emerge from it, in the artists, actors, intellectuals and the public. The film crosses a series of circles, The first, barely known by the public, links certain cities like London with Simon McBurney, Berlin with Thomas Ostermeier, Cesena with Romeo Castellucci and even Brazzaville with Dieudonné Niangouna, where guest artists imagine, prepare and rehearse over the months. These materials will all converge in July in the second circle, namely, the city of Avignon. A forum and a city of the theatre in which they will lastly incarnate, in the third circle – the most mysterious, the most exposed – that of the stages on which the shows are played, the beating heart of the city-theatre. At this very moment, FabricA will be born in Avignon, a theatre “factory” that will make it possible to rehearse, all year long, the shows being created for the Festival, starting with those for the Cour d'honneur. The film's images go back and forth, from one view to another, from one experience to another, from one circle to another, and in this way build the film, through continuous crossings. ADB