In 2021, the Festival d’Avignon puts men in their place

Between desire for emancipation and changes of model, the heroines assert themselves, far from the pressures and diktats of society.

Are women the future of humanity? At the Festival d’Avignon, shows pose this question casually, by tracing the contours of societies where women lead their boat without being a wife, mistress, mother, daughter, cook or maid of a “he” having the ascendancy over “them”. The time has come to restore the balance between male and female prerogatives. The theater does not erase the heroes from its scenes. But they no longer play the figureheads. At their side, sometimes even a step in front of them, heroines hold their head high. Here then are in full light these thinking heads of the contemporary world, freed (or attempting to be) from dominions and armed for the fight. Whether they prove to be powerful or fragile, victorious or lost, one thing is certain: they owe what they are only to themselves.

Paradigm shift

Embodiment of this desire for emancipation, Gabrielle, a French teacher played by actress Nicole Garcia, who slips her boyish ways into the words of author Marie NDiaye. With her, Frédéric Bélier-Garcia, director of Royan, examines the career of a teacher “who has lost her ties by a process of successive abandonment”. Gabrielle indeed leaves husband and child to play her part alone. However, specifies the director, “Even if they have left a wound in it, these abandonments constitute it fully”. Gabrielle is not empty of her missing parts, “Which is rare in female characters”. Rare, too, is this finding of a release that takes behavioral clichés backwards. Marie NDiaye’s heroine is moving towards emancipation, which is to name “her feverishness and weakness rather than demonstrating her strength.” This reversal of values ​​upsets the codes of a Western tradition that too often equates an individual’s power with the size of his muscles. What if it was the other way around? If invincibility was gained by confessing to failures, accepting flaws? What if the triumph resulted not from gain but from renunciation?

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