It’s the Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov, still struck by a ban on leaving Moscow, who will open the Avignon festival this summer. Il offers an adaptation of a fantastic short story by Anton Chekhov, The Black Monk, whose hero, a Russian intellectual named Andrei Kovrin, gradually sinks into madness. A first version was presented in January at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg (Germany), where the artist, banned from leaving Moscow, had been authorized to travel.
“He’s a very little-known Chekhov and it’s a very free adaptation of a story enigmatic, sometimes violent”Olivier Py, outgoing director of the festival, told AFP, who will present two pieces himself, including a ten-hour one (with interludes).
Iranian Amir Reza Koohestani, who presented at the festival Hearing (2016)
and Summerless (2018), returns with the play In transitinspired by Anna’s novel
Seghers, “a story of lost passports, refugees, and identity”according to
Olivier Py.
Palestinian artists are in the spotlight with Bashar Murkus, who puts on the show Milk, on the role of women in war; the essayist Elias Sanbar will recite, accompanied by music, poems by the great poet Mahmoud Darwish; while four Arab poetesses, including two Palestinians, will present a poetic performance.
Lebanon, hit by an unprecedented economic crisis, is evoked through two artists from this country: the playwright Hanane Hajj Ali who stages Joggingonly one on stage where she “jogs through the chaos in Beirut and conjures up questions of “filiation, suffering and mourning”themes that can also be found in Ali Chahrour’s choreography in When my mother used to tell.
More and more female directors have been scheduled at the Festival d’Avignon over the past two years and this edition has several (nearly half), starting with Kubra Khademi, a young visual artist, painter and performer from Afghanistan who has been based in France for a few years, who signs the poster for the festival and will put on an exhibition.
Among these artists: Anne Théron mounts Iphigenia according to Tiago Rodrigues, the future director of Avignon; visual artist Miet Warlop recounts his vision of theater inspired by the loss of his brother; Élise Vigier stages a group of women in search of a missing author or even Sofia Adrian Jupither adapts Solitaireone of the last works of the playwright Lars Norén, who died a year ago, and which is a kind of Waiting for Godot Swedish. Irish choreographer Oona Doherty explores in Lady Magma the dual identity of artist and mother, while the collective the platform revisit Little Red Riding Hood with a feminist perspective.