“I am you in words”, wrote Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. This could be the motto of the Festival d’Avignon, after nearly eight dazzling decades. Today as in the past, the words, gestures, sounds, and images of the artists, allow us to be the other, revealing the many-sided, radiant beings that we humans are. We do not tell stories merely to survive, like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights. We tell stories to live together, and to learn how to do so better. Being together means blending with one another. Whether from Paris or Beirut, Kigali or Berlin, Orléans or Marrakech, artists and technicians from some fifteen countries will gather this summer in Avignon to meet their audiences and build an ephemeral but very real utopia: that of being together. This human assembly is the very DNA of theatre. We remember, we predict, we pass on, we question, we doubt, we translate, we imagine, we desire… All in the first-person plural, with all our differences. At the Festival d’Avignon, diversity is a treasure. We cherish this democratic dialogue where, through art, different visions of the world can meet and converse. All year round, Avignon vibrates to the rhythm of Avignon, Terre de Culture 2025, a programme that celebrates curiosity. Let us cultivate this curiosity for the future and renew the drive for decentralisation, democratisation and cultural exception that began after World War II - an unfinished but precious movement that has borne much fruit and will continue to bring us together. In a world where authoritarianism sow the seeds of war, threatens democracies, denies the climate emergency, and obscures any vision of the future, let us use every moment together to imagine new paths forward. The Festival d’Avignon is a stage where the future is constantly being reinvented. For a month, or for a lifetime, let us be free and inventive. Let us celebrate, without ever forgetting the tragedies of the past and present. Let us celebrate, because the future is calling us. Let us be the other in words, for that is the most beautiful way to be fully ourselves. Together.
Tiago Rodrigues
Director of Festival d’Avignon — Martch 2025