To celebrate its 80th edition, the Festival d’Avignon raises the flag of questions. Poetic and political, intimate and collective, theatrical or choreographic, in French or Korean: a multitude of inquiries carried by the creativity of artists from across the country and around the world.
This cultural utopia, founded by Jean Vilar, has been repeated and reinvented since 1947. It is a celebration of the sharing of questions between artists and audiences. This is the origin of the thousands of captivating and impassioned debates that enliven the city’s streets and squares in July. After attending performances, the audience, on equal footing, expresses the opinions and emotions sparked by the works and freely debates theatre and the world. This is how, each summer, the heart of the land of theatre beats.
In an era haunted by bad answers, sometimes overly simplistic and all too effective at further dividing an already deeply polarised society, it is more necessary than ever to come together and cultivate a love of questions and an appreciation for the beauty of doubt. To keep debate alive in Avignon, we offer a programme made up of a plurality of artistic voices, reflecting a diversity of worldviews while upholding absolute respect for freedom of expression and creation. Only through contact with difference can disagreement arise, which is the starting point of dialogue. The Festival d’Avignon exists to bring people together and unite them, not around a single way of thinking, nor in silence in the face of the state of the world. In Avignon, people gather in ever greater numbers to discover the many questions asked by artists, and they come together through exchanges nourished by free and critical thought. Under the flag of the land of theatre.
Tiago Rodrigues
Director of the Festival d'Avignon