What do you actually do when you do theatre? The best way to find out is to go to the Festival d’Avignon in the south of France. It is one of the most important theater festivals in the world. For this year’s edition, longtime director Olivier Py has given the motto “il était une fois”, once upon a time. This is how the good stories, the fairy tales, begin. But also the bad stories, the political myths.
For Py, it’s an ongoing struggle between celestial storytelling and material violence. A nice performance, but the theater itself is more and more surrounded by an air of “once upon a time”. The audience stays away, also in France. And the great tales of the theatre, the magic and the unforgettable? One often searches in vain.
It’s the simple gestures that can open up the endless realm of the imagination. One person plays a story to another. That’s what Peter Brook writes in his classic “The Empty Room”. The news of Brooks’ death reached the public shortly before the opening, and Avignon was shocked. Here the great theater enlightener celebrated one of his greatest successes in 1985 with “Le Mahabharata”, most recently he made a guest appearance there in 2006 with “Sizwe Banzi est mort”. He was once, one will now have to say about Brook. And with it an epoch that still knew the magic of the stage?
Py is someone who believes in theatre. Who constantly resists degrading the theater to a phrase machine. In recent years he has repeatedly invoked the festival as a “spiritual community”, as a conspiracy of art against the world. Someone who is serious.
At the press conference for the opening, he is sitting in the courtyard of the Saint-Louis monastery, together with his star guest Kirill Serebrennikov. The Russian artist has been invited to Avignon several times in recent years. This time he had the honor of playing “The Black Monk” on the large stage in the courtyard of the former papal palace, thus officially opening the festival.
From the first impression, the two could hardly be more different. Py appears in white leather shoes and a light-colored shirt, his hand playing with a fan. Serebrennikov with a three-day beard, black T-shirt and baseball cap never takes off his dark sunglasses for a moment.
Coquettish lightness versus unworldly depth? A difference that also continues in the productions, colorful cheerfulness and existential heaviness. But despite their different approaches, both are united by the idea that theater is not just the continuation of journalism or activism with other means, but also has something to contribute to the pressing issues of the time with its own means.
Which questions these are is debatable. A few activists use the press conference to protest – against more and more concrete deserts in the Provençal idyll. Once you have wandered through the industrial areas around the TGV train station on the outskirts of the city – the French railways almost traditionally go on strike at the beginning of the holidays, transport options to the old town are then rare – you understand the concern. The applause is correspondingly polite, the concern is shared, nobody has to get stuck. Py emphasizes the festival’s contribution to the “green revolution”, of course we always want to be more climate-friendly.
Theater is a waste of energy
But then Py comes back to his actual topic: the theatre. Energy has to be wasted, not saved – of body and mind. Following Kant, it is still about the following: What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for? So to the question, what is man. Py defends his idea of the “théâtre populaire”, a democratic popular theatre. These are questions that concern everyone. It is his legacy: the 76th edition of the renowned festival in the southern French city of the popes with its famous bridge is also his last.
How Py came to direct the festival in 2013 is itself a dramatic story. He had previously been called to the capital from Orléans as director of the renowned Paris Théâtre de l’Odéon. The President’s wife Bernadette Chirac is said to have personally supported the young theater maker. When Nicolas Sarkozy moved into the Élysée Palace, the mood changed. Py was dropped and replaced by Luc Bondy, in exchange for being put in charge of the festival. A courtly intrigue that today also falls under “once upon a time”.
As a farewell, Py erected a monument to himself with the ten-hour piece “Ma Jeunesse exaltée”. A colorful and comedic spectacle about a harlequin, which builds on his great success “La Servante”, with which he was invited to Avignon for the first time in 1995. It is at the same time an exuberant and extravagant plea for the poetic on the stage, not entirely free of narcissistic traits. That’s the happy side.
Scene from the farewell play by Olivier Py
Which: Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon Festival
The Dark Side is Serebrennikov’s The Black Monk, based on a story by Anton Chekhov, a somber retreat. A desperate young intellectual and artist finds himself caught between freedom and madness. It is not only a psychological drama, but describes a cultural fate. A consistent attitude seems impossible.
Nothing unfamiliar to Serebrennikov. Shortly before the performance in Avignon, the premiere was at the end of January in Hamburg’s Thalia Theater, it became known that the management of the Moscow Gogol Center had been changed, and the name was also changed back to the Nikolaj Gogol Theater. This is equivalent to closing the stage.
Serebrennikov took over the Gogol Center in 2012 and turned it into a sensational stage beyond national borders. At that time there were still advocates for cultural modernization in the Russian government. As the struggle for power became rougher, Serebrennikov was made an example of from 2017 with arrest, trial and house arrest. He now lives and works in Germany. At the last presentation of the Gogol Center under the meaningful title “I will not take part in the war”, he reported via video. Nobody can take the idea of freedom away from you, Serebrennikov said.
The wind in the papal palace
On the stage in the courtyard of the papal palace, the strong wind, which has not abated even after nightfall, sweeps through the stage setting, driving the fog out of the machine through the old walls. “The Black Monk” unfolds its full power, one looks almost reverently at the drama between the starry sky above one and the moral law in one, as Kant called it. It ends with thunderous applause and the call “Stop war!”, which was hardly needed in this unambiguity.
“The Black Monk” by Kirill Serebrennikov
Which: Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon Festival
Not too much, but too little wind, that leads to tragedy in “Iphigénie”. The eponymous daughter of the commander is sacrificed to propitiate the gods, get wind for the fleet and continue the war. A classic piece of theater history that Tiago Rodrigues presents in a new version that has been reduced to the essentials. Anne Théron staged this coolly and epicly as the breaking up of a common world, even surpassing Serebrennikov in lightlessness and gloom.
The name of the Portuguese theater maker will be heard more frequently in Avignon in the future. Rodrigues succeeds Py as director of the festival. That was announced last year when Rodrigues’ “The Cherry Orchard” starring Isabelle Huppert was invited. His “Iphigénie” shows that Rodrigues is not only familiar with the narrative devices of the theater, but is also familiar with them. This also gives hope for the years to come.
This year’s festival’s surprise hit is Belgian artist Miet Warlop’s One Song, a no-nonsense appraisal of contemporary theater: a group of actors intoning the same song over and over again, driven by a relentless and ever-faster metronome and a squad of hyper-hyped fans. Water drips from above, which has to be caught with buckets and towels on the side. Not to forget the multitude of messages that are waiting in large piles at the edge of the stage to be transmitted. It is arranged as an athletic course: cello on the balance beam, singing on the treadmill, keyboard on the climbing frame.
Surprise success in Avignon: Miet Warlop’s “One Song”
Which: Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon Festival
After an hour, everyone is at the limit and beyond – high-performance art and meaning inflation to the point of exhaustion while it’s already raining through the ceiling. “One Song” is the fourth part of NTGent’s Godard-inspired series “Histoire(s) du Théâtre”, a self-inquiry of the theater. The third part, Angélica Liddell, celebrated its premiere in Avignon last year with her extreme and excess performance “Liebestod”. And for “One Song” it can be predicted without any risk that the piece will also be acclaimed elsewhere, among other things, the piece can be seen in Berlin at the end of October.
Admittedly, there is also mediocrity in Avignon, as well as unsuccessful adaptations of novels and crooked updates. Not to mention the off-festival, the unofficial program of nearly 1,500 plays whose billboards flood the city, including plenty of classics and romantic comedies, a few of which are reliably promoted as “delightfully politically incorrect”. The Festival d’Avignon runs until the end of July. The opening days impressively underlined the claim to be the place where the present and future of the art form theater is negotiated. That’s what you do when you’re doing theatre: to question yourself over and over again.