Transmission Impossible

A project by the Festival d'Avignon, the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès and Mathilde Monnier

How to pass on the performing arts? That’s the question asked by this programme, conceived in 2024 as an agora with the Hermès Foundation and Mathilde Monnier. Transmission Impossible brings together fifty young French and international artists—most of them recipients of a Hermès Foundation grant—to experience the Festival d’Avignon as a laboratory of reflection thanks to shows, rehearsals, and encounters. Accompanied by author and choreographer Cristina Morales, filmmaker Patric Chiha, and playwright Stéphane Bouquet, Mathilde Monnier invites those young artists to transform fluid thought into performances during sessions open to the public. Aimed at opening new artistic horizons, Transmission impossible calls on a new multidisciplinary team every year to provide ever more perspectives and research angles. 

Transmission Impossible es un proyecto de inmersión, de intercambio y de investigación dentro del Festival d’Avignon para 50 artistas franceses e internacionales de las artes vivas. Los participantes se sumergirán en el Festival y se impregnarán de una edición-laboratorio para inventar el mañana.  

Interview with Olivier Fournier, Mathilde Monnier and Tiago Rodrigues

About the project

Transmission Impossible is an immersion, exchange, and research project for young artists and performing arts students taking place within the Festival d’Avignon. This postgraduate project brings together many young talents of live arts supported by of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès as part of its Artists in the Community programme, wich aims to promote access to the performing arts professions with particular attention to the issue of equal opportunities. Under the coordination of Mathilde Monnier, the participants will experience the Festival d’Avignon as a space of learning and artistic experimentation, thanks to workshops and masterclasses. It will also be an agora of the gaze, where these young professional artists will be given privileged access to shows, rehearsals, and encounters with the artists of this year’s edition of the Festival. Each group of 25 participants will embark on a week-long adventure, as part of a group made up of people from all over France and from other countries and continents, and will be given the opportunity to take part in open to the public and to professionals performances.

Concept note

After completing their training, young artists from all over France and abroad are invited to immerse themselves in the vastness of the Avignon nights, as if in a cauldron of endless possibilities: to see shows together, to shadow artists at work on extraordinary stages, to talk to scenographers, to lighting engineers, to strangers, or even to visit the kitchen of the Festival. Perhaps something can be transmitted this way, not as organised knowledge, but through happy accidents and unexpected interactions within this endless well of know-how, experiences, and tools that is the Festival d’Avignon. Transmission Impossible, not because nothing can ever be shared of the history of forms, but because we are dreaming here of the possibility that aesthetic ideas could follow explosive and unexpected roads—it was impossible, yet it happened. So here’s the rule of the game: to offer young artists the opportunity to come up with their own way of being spectators of this machine-festival (both on-and offstage). Then to give them a chance to share the way they feel, understand, and react, as part of a work-out in the Église des Célestins, which will open its doors every weekend for this project to offer a moment of performance, exchange… and maybe transgression. Project led by four artists : Stéphane Bouquet, Patric Chiha, Cristina Garcia Morales, Mathilde Monnier

Mathilde Monnier, January 2024

Mathilde Monnier performed in the dance companies of Viola Farber and François Verret before taking up choreography in 1984. From one work to the next, she defied expectations by producing work that was endlessly fresh and new. Her appointment as director of the Centre Choreographique National de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon in 1994 marked the beginning of a period of experimentation with other fields of art, and a reflection on the role of the institution and its outreach. Her dances such as Pour Antigone, Déroutes, Les lieux de là, Surrogate Cities, Soapéra and Gustavia, El Baile, Black lights … have been performed on the biggest stages, as well as at international festivals. She alternates solo projects and collaborative works with various figures from the art world, such as Katerine, Christine Angot, La Ribot and Heiner Goebbels, and Tiago Rodrigues.. From January 2014 to June 2019, she has been the director of the Centre National de la Danse based in Pantin and Lyon. Since 2020 she is back to her artistic work in a place called la Halle Tropisme a creative and cultural cooperative.

Patric Chiha is an Austrian filmmaker of Hungarian and Lebanese origin, born in Vienna (Austria) in 1975. He moved to Paris at the age of 18 to study fashion design. He then studied film editing at Insas Film School in Brussels. His short films and documentaries (Home, Les messieurs) have been selected in a variety of film festivals. In 2009 he directed his first feature film, Domaine, starring Béatrice Dalle, which premiered at the Mostra di Venezia. Followed by Boys like us (2014), and the documentaries Brothers of the night (2016) and If it were love (2019), which both premiered at the Berlinale. The beast in the jungle (2023), which also premiered at the Berlinale, is his fifth feature film. Patric Chiha lives and works in Paris.

Stéphane Bouquet has published several books of poetry and poetry-related works (Neige écran, Imec, 2023; Le Fait de vivre, Champ Vallon, 2021, and La Cité de Paroles, Corti, 2018). Two of his books have been translated into English. He has offered translations of various American poets who have taken urban matter to task, including Paul Blackburn, James Schuyler, Robert Creeley and four books by Peter Gizzi. His latest translation of the poet Lindsay Turner is due for publication in summer 2024 (ed. Joca Seria). He is also a regular dramaturge for choreographer Mathilde Monnier and director Robert Cantarella, who staged his first play Monstres. He is also a screenwriter, having spent many years as a critic for Cahiers du cinéma. He has published studies on Clint Eastwood, Gus Van Sant, Eisenstein and Pasolini, and has cowritten a number of films, notably by Sébastien Lifshitz.

Cristina Morales (Granada, 1985) has a degree in Law and Political Sciences and is a member of the contemporary dance company Iniciative Sexual Feminina, based in Barcelona. She is the author of a book of short stories and four novels. The last of them, Easy Reading, received the Herralde Novel Prize in 2018, in 2019 the National Narrative Prize from the Spanish Ministry of Culture, and in 2022 the Internationale Literaturpreis – Haus der Kulturen der Welt from the German Ministry of Culture, being the first Spanish work to receive this award. In 2021 she was selected by the literary magazine Granth among the best writers in Spanish language under 35 years old. Her work has been adapted to film, theater and television and translated into a dozen languages.

Artistic coordination and educational support Mathilde Monnier (choreographer)
In collaboration with Stéphane Bouquet (author and playwright), Patric Chiha (filmmaker), Cristina Morales (author and choreographer)
With artists receiving Artistes dans la Cité scholarships from the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès: Yassim Aït Abdelmalek, Jessim Belfar, Arthur Berthault, Matthieu Calvié, Malick Cissé, Robin Condamin, Luciana Costa-Piallat, Jade Crespy, Stéphane Delile, Nina Depays, Elena Dombrowski, Marina Escobar, Elsa Fafin, Ilonah Fagotin, Adam Fontaine, Barbara Ford, Pomme François-Ferron, Fantine Gelu, Ametonyo Gomes Da Silva, Paul Grassin, Ramo Jalilyan, Tristan Leroy, Vladimir Leroy, Woodina Louisa, Marie Mangin, Chloé Monteiro, Michael Nana, Ephraïm Nanikunzola, Apolline Peccarisi, Louise Phelipon, Lucas Resende Soares, Hugo Serre, Ehsan Shayanfard, Clara Thibault, Julia Touam, Alina Tshkovrebiva, Zaïna Yalioua 
and thirteen young international artists: Jessica Allemann, Jorge Ernesto Barrón, Mélanie Ferreira, Andréa Givanovitch, In Hwa Jin, Chou Kuan-Jou, Laura Kutkaitė, Zoé Lakhnati, Marco Mendonça, Aristeo Mora de Anda, Eunsil Noh, Eglė Švedkauskaitė, Hung Wei-Yao 
With the participation of artists, designers and technicians from the 78th edition of the Festival d'Avignon.

This edition of Transmission Impossible is dedicated to the memory of Titouan Maire.

Production Festival d'Avignon, Fondation d'entreprise Hermès
Coproduction National Theater & Concert Hall (Taipei), Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange, Seoul Performing Arts Festival, Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisboa), Lithuanian Theatre Information Centre, Association MM
With the support of the French Embassy in Bolivia, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (Mexico), Lithuanian Culture Institute
In partnership with La Garance Scène nationale de Cavaillon
Aknowledgements La Criée – Théâtre national de Marseille, Les Tréteaux de France Centre dramatique national