Among the new forms engendered by the constraint of confinement, appeared yesterday on the Avignon festival site and on its Facebook page, a new experience: the virtual press conference of a festival which we do not know if it will be able to to stand.
Will it be shifted, resized, or canceled? The fate of the 74th edition of the Avignon Festival is not yet sealed. One thing is certain: his “feasibility is compromised“to use the term of its director, Olivier Py.
A festival that would not survive a cancellation?
However if the festival did not take place, the consequences would be catastrophic for the festival itself (which lives at 50% of its revenues and may not recover), for companies which might not survive this cancellation , for artists and technicians of course, for theaters (which accumulate closings), but also for the city and the region.
In this context, the virtual press conference which announced the equally virtual programming of the festival, suspended to the decisions of the health authorities, could have taken a rather desperate turn. It did not happen.
At 2 p.m. yesterday, trumpets and cicadas opened an astonishing sequence. And the exercise, despite or perhaps even thanks to these constraints, has turned into a manifesto. It was the utopia of the festival that was shown, and more broadly that of the theater. This is my theory.
“Telling you today and at what time exactly how the 74th edition will look is difficult, but it seems important to tell you the one we dreamed of“, Announced Olivier Py.
What can the theater do?
A priori a director in front of his webcam and a succession of videos of confined artists presenting shows that may not take place, is not exciting. However, over the course of this live, a filigree answer to the question “what can the theater do?” and what can it do more than ever today.
Even before the coronavirus epidemic invaded the world, the theme of this 74th edition had been given: Eros and Thanatos. Mythological couple of love and death. How do we love and desire today? What is our relationship to death? And how do we live in our time this tension between these two inseparable poles? Questions that suddenly collide with dizzying acuity as humanity goes through a historic ordeal.
So over the videos, the program has become a necessary utopia. Director Ivo Von Hove speaking about his show on the young Freud and his determination to understand human nature in a different way, the Siamese company evoking these songs from the north of Greece which make it possible to overcome tragedies, the Collective Raoul telling this “Ceremony “where participants witness without understanding a ritual that buries an old system … Moral dilemmas on kindness and mercy, a deratist flute player, the language of the poet Valère Novarina trying to heal the world with more sensitive words than sensible, or the subconscious of groups and their impulses: everything seems to be able to give shape to what we feel and face together with this crisis.
At the end of the virtual conference, the demonstration was made (by the absolute and by the potential absence) of what the theater can do for us.
by Mathilde Serrell
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