2024-07-04 14:54:03
AThe obvious closure for the “Nouveau Front Populaire”, the new popular front, is at the entrance of the Republic. However, only theaters are advertised, this year there is also an election campaign. The famous Festival d’Avignon is overshadowed by the general elections. Where is the country going? With this request you walk past the medieval city wall and up the Boulevard de la République towards the Pope’s palace, where the beautiful city center welcomes you with its southern French flair. The French theater scene is more politically turbulent than ever.
Not that things have been particularly quiet at the Festival d’Avignon in recent years. A year ago violent riots broke out across the country after police shot dead a young man. Two years ago the response to the Russian military attack on Ukraine was “Stop the War!”. And three years ago, loud demonstrations took place around the city walls that did not want vaccination certificate checks when visiting cafes. And this year? After Macron’s surprise dismissal of the National Assembly, the opening fell on the eve of the first round of voting.
The shock after the results on Sunday evening was great. Tiago Rodrigues, the director of the festival, said that he will not cooperate with the National Rally in any way, even if it means giving a grant from Paris. The Portuguese theater maker, whose play “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” is attracting attention throughout Europe, speaks of “Resistance”. First “Future Populaire”, now “Opposition”? It seems that half of France is in the grip of a new fiction to stop the rightists.
Ariane Mnouchkine, Grande Dame of the French theater and founder of the Théâtre du Soleil, sought clear words. Mnouchkine wrote in the left-wing newspaper Libération: “I think we are part of this, we, the left, we, the cultural workers. “When people say what they see, they are told that they are wrong, that they did not see what they saw. It just feels false, they told them. Later, when they persisted, they told them that they were fools, and when they persisted, they called them fools.”
Due to current events, we have organized an evening at the Festival d’Avignon to mobilize against the extreme right, with many famous theater people and people from civil society. But who is he talking to? The theater stages gathered in Avignon are not the support of the “Rassemblement National”, on the contrary. Such episodes, designed as self-correcting soliloquies, seem like a dispassionate confirmation of Mnouchkine’s writings. Wouldn’t it be good to invite people to a debate about the role of cultural poverty in the promotion of the right?
The opening trumpets include power productions
Arts, the 78th edition of the Festival d’Avignon is off to a strong start. Rodrigues presented his new piece “Hécube, pas Hécube” with the Comédie-Française conference in an outdoor, old woodshed. He skillfully overcomes two stages: a group of actors reenacts “Hecuba” by Euripides, in which the title character becomes the avenger of his son’s murderer. At the same time, the main actor is conducting an investigation against those responsible for an unfunded state institution in which children are abused, including his disabled son.
Mixed roles: the actress is, as the title suggests, Hecuba and not Hecuba. For Rodrigues, Troy became a welfare state besieged and destroyed by austerity; The vanquished no longer fought for improvements or justice, but only wanted revenge. Adults have limited influence through where society and the state fail. Is there a solution to this age-old conflict? Rodrigues, like Euripides, does not offer the required audience.
The opening of “Demon” is also brilliant, with the top actress Angélica Liddell playing Ingmar Bergman on the big stage in the courtyard of the Papal Palace. The movie star once watched John Paul II’s funeral on television and wrote his own eulogy, including a faithful replica of the pope’s coffin. Liddell has already shown in 2021 with his bloody bull performance “Liebestod” in Avignon that he has mastered the art of self-harm with blades as a virtue as the young Rainald Goetz once did in Klagenfurt.
The great actress Angélica Liddell opens with “Demon, Funeral of Bergman” in the Court of Honor of the Popes’ Palace
Source: dpa
Liddell’s script for Demon follows a note from Bergman’s workbook. First: rather abuse. What’s next: Scornful listeners. Now find your big themes: love, death, fear, art, feces, blood, sperm, age, redemption, hate, guilt, shame and more. Wearing high heels and almost naked, Liddell reached over the pants of the Catholic Church and threw a used bidet over the wall of the Pope’s Palace. In front of the row of old people, nude river parades, provocative female nudity – an allegory of transience.
In the end, Liddell sat in Bergman’s box in the light drizzle, an intimate conversation between the beautiful film of Catholic inspired extremism and Scandinavian-Protestant existentialism. A boy asked: “When will I die?” His answer was: “All the time! Always!” Liddell is the last Nietzschean of theater, a follower of Antonin Artaud. For him it is about the great affirmation of the circle of life with all its abysses, about yes to death. In comparison, Florentina Holzinger’s Catholicism farce “Sancta” seems harmless.
The Festival d’Avignon runs until July 21st. By then we will not only know who won the Tour de France or the men’s European football championship, but also who won the parliamentary elections in France. What this means for French culture and theater can probably already be guessed.
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