Festival D’Avignon – The Lies of Art

Mediterranean temperatures are now also known in Germany. The meteorologists speak of extreme heat, also of drought. The a few decades old forecasts of climate researchers are now our present. However, it is clear to the southern French that they had a certain lead in their considerations of how to maintain a more than just tolerable handling of hot summers. During the day, but especially at lunchtime, in Avignon you leave the charming, car -free streets and alleys in the city center to tourists, whom there are some in the festival season, and pull back into cooler interiors.

Only when the sun is a little deeper does the city appear over full by humans. In a good mood and relaxed, you can move in and with the fray. The voices form a continuous noise. Like market birds praise free theater artists what they do in the evening: especially entertainment with and without political standards, in dealing with classics or completely according to their own text book. This is the off program, which has established itself here as a counterpoint to the festival’s demanding theater offer. Hundreds of posters provide information about the variety of performances.

On the last Saturday evening, the human current, which took the center, specifically in the direction of the Place du Palais in motion, past an old horse carousel and past a acclaimed juggling artist, also past the numerous very well -attended restaurants, which reconciled French cuisine in a very pleasant way with the Italian reconciliation.

The common goal is the Pope Palace, which is reminiscent of the long -past church history importance of Provence. As every year, the Festival D’Avignon, which knows numerous other venues, is opened in the courtyard. Cape Verdian choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas presented one, very short, with “Nôt”.

The work is to be found in the program list, inspired by the story collection »Tausendeine Nacht«. But here the audience does not expect an exotic view of the Orient and no dancing fairy tale uncle. Freitas uses the framework of the template: King Schahriyar, shaken in his trust, is offended in his masculinity, only marries his women for one night. The next morning he kills her. Scheherazade evades this circulation of violence, tells her husband evening a story and knows exactly where she has to take a break.

The ritual -like one, the repetition and its deviation, stipulated pattern and the outbreak from it that interests the choreographer. In an extremely energetic evening, she has an eight -member ensemble celebrated birth and life, illness and death. Worlds meet for this so -called performance. Early masks cover the faces, elegant choreographies alternate with artificial movements, pop music meets Mahler, driving drums follows Strawinsky, a somewhat fecal (and thus infantile) humor makes space for graceful pictures.

And when the big final Nick Caves classic “The Mercy Seat” is given, in which God’s mercy and the electric chair are sung alike, it is clear that we are here with a different form of dialectic. Is death conjured up in this work to keep it away or call it? “And i’m not afraid to die”, sings Cave (“I’m not afraid to die”). Only art lies so beautiful and clever. And Marlene Monteiro Freitas is one of the most exciting artistic discoveries that are currently to be made.

The premiere audience has less than a mere applause for this one and a half hour theater evening. The resistance that this bulky, sometimes inaccessible staging causes cannot be overlooked. Neither does the fact that the force behind this work does not leave anyone cold or bad.

For a German, especially since a Berliner, Freitas’ “Nôt” is also revealing because Matthias Lilienthal, the designated director of the Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, has announced not only the scandal choreographer Florentina Holzinger, but also freelance part of the artistic direction. If you had the opportunity to look at the Holzinger’s nude numbers with feminist impetus in the capital-although the tickets are competitive-Freitas’ work has so far only been seen as part of some selected festivals. In any case, with this personnel decision, Lilienthal certainly did something very right.

While “Nôt” is not too little puzzling (but no less attractive), Thomas Ostermeier in the Opéra Grand presented a staging without any secret. The artistic director of the Berlin Schaubühne and regular guest in Avignon returns to Norway’s national writer Henrik Ibsen with “the wild duck”. In 2012 he had a remarkable success with “a folk enemy”, first at the festival, then in Berlin, soon to a guest appearance in the world.

In “The Wild Ducks”, which is also due to open the coming season at the Schaubühne, Ostermeier Ibsen takes again at the word and translates it into the present. The big questions of the drama survive: is the truth reasonable to man? Or does the lie have to help over the severe reality? And does one or the other have something like luck at all?

Ostermeier gives the family conflict and the struggle of the competing worldviews. But the staging is conventional to Bieder. And the cliché trap snaps and keeps the stage on the stage, when the fallen Hjalmar Ekdal appears in underwear with long unkempt hair, reaches for beer for breakfast and shouts at his daughter. Social contrasts belong on stage. But in this way?

In the quarry in the nearby boulbon, perhaps the most impressive open -air stage in Europe, the dance kone Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker presented its new production. “Brel” is a tribute to the revered chansonnier Jacques Brel, for whom De Keersmaeker worked with the young dancer and choreographer Solal Marotte. Here, two generations that separate a few decades are looking for the connecting one. In the music of Brel, which is danced here, de Keersmaeker, who still notes the ballet, which she has left far behind, and the avant -garde dance theater of the 80s, and Marotte, who comes from break dance, are still noted. The audience celebrates this extremely (Belgo) French evening and sings: from »Le Diable« to »Le Bon Dieu«.

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Tiago Rodrigues, head of the festival d’Avignon since 2023, triumphed after the opening weekend with the premiere of “La Distance” in the intimate venue L’Autre Scène. As an author and director, a chamber game succeeded, of whom one did not know that it was still being written in this kind. In the apocalyptic year 2077, father and daughter communicate with each other via voice messages. He is a doctor, lagging behind on the earth that is caused by catastrophic heat and political arguments. She is a young scientist, just arrived at Mars, with all fear, also hopeful and ready to leave the past behind and, literally, forget.

The family conflict is carried out by all means of acting. And how on the way are political questions of scope negotiated: is there a future without a past? Is there justice for a few? Is, as Brecht said, “everything new better than everything old”?

The performing art is not at the end. In Avignon, again, frowned upon on German stages, the great feelings that are carried further into the audience are frowned upon. Rodrigues does not come up with aesthetic monetary, but lets artistic worlds collide. It is gratifying that someone finds the courage to leave the scene to celebrate the birth of the performance from the spirit of the ritual, as Marlene Monteiro Freitas does, and to bring the narrative theater written down and smiled up by Zeitgeist hunters as in “La Distance”.

The 79th edition of the festival d’Avignon will take place until July 26th.
www.festival-avignon.com