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The Avignon Festival 2006 - A Personal Encounter (Part I)A Rumble Amongst Critics and the Historical Perspective (1)Jacqueline Fletcher visits the 60th Avignon FestivalDateline: 19th July, 2006The 60th Avignon Festival has just passed the half-way mark and I'm starting to get a feel for the broader scope of the venture. Having been a veteran of the Edinburgh Festival for about 25 years it's difficult to avoid making comparisons. But I've nurtured a yearning for the Avignon Festival for many a year, due to its reputation as the festival of choice for the adherents of intercultural and interdisciplinary arts, as well as for an intellectual underpinning that is typically French. Having spent half my life living in The Netherlands being spoilt by the Holland Festival, the Mickery circuit and the general generosity of the Dutch Arts Council towards international theatre practitioners, along with the availability of cheap and easy travel to Brussels, Paris or Berlin for the big events, I've often wondered why I've never made that extra effort and put Avignon on my agenda. In some respects I'm a bit disappointed. Last year's festival (the one I should have attended) created a furore. The controversial programming of the 2005 associate artist, the Belgian genius and enfant terrible Jan Fabre, had conservative critics foaming at the mouth. At a festival renowned for pushing at the boundaries of innovation, it seemed the organisers had just gone that bit too far. The festival's detractors penned ferocious diatribes in the national dailies, exhibited their outrage on radio and TV, and its defenders manned the cultural barricades in solidarity: it was all very French. (It was even more shocking coming just two years after the disaster of 2003 when a strike by les intermittents (1) caused the festival to be cancelled. ) Fabre, of course, is an acolyte of the most savage detractor of 20th century bourgeois culture, Antonin Artaud, and has perhaps succeeded in achieving by proxy the effects which were most desired by Artaud, but which in his lifetime eluded him. Fabre's oeuvre, hybrid form of dance, movement, text, imagery, is provocative and the reverberations were to be felt on a national scale long after the festival had packed its bags and de-camped. Accusations of cultural sabotage abounded. The right-wing press had been waiting in the woodwork for years for an opportunity and now they wiggled out en masse to claim that for years the festival had betrayed the spirit of its founding father, the irreproachable Jean Vilar, culturally canonised even before his death in 1971. The questions raised have been the big ones, debated on both sides of the divide. Is this a symptom of a culture in crisis? Have we lost a sense of direction? Have we lost our identity in a globally mediatized culture? Have we become so elitist we are loosing contact with out audiences? What responsibility to we have as artists towards our own communities and to other communities in the world? How do we communicate our experiences of these strange new realities of the 21st century in good conscience? All of these questions are very relevant in the context of French post-war culture and its ideological underpinning. Selections of collected articles by cultural critics have been published in book form, 'le cas Avignon' has become a cause célèbre and I have a feeling that Artaud has been sitting on a cloud in heaven laughing fit to wet himself. Unfortunately for me, this means that this year's programmers have been playing safe, attempting to assuage the criticism levelled at the Festival's recent history of artistic provocation and to keep the critical pitbulls at bay. Avignon is, after all, funded directly by the state and 60% of its revenues are drawn from the public purse. If one adds to that the ancillary funds that accrue to the Festival via the city council and local authorities, the up-keep of the Festival's public archives in the superb library of the Maison Jean Vilar, funding from Radio France, France Culture and Arte, as well as other state funded organisations for free discussions, lectures, films and public conferences, the event costs the tax payer a packet. (1) Les intermittents are seasonal workers who have been accorded special regulations for social benefits as they are not likely to work all year round. It's quite complex and not unified throughout Europe but, to simplify matters, unemployment benefits in most North-Western European countries have been 70 or sometimes 80% of the average wage earned over a specified period (usually about 26 weeks out of 52). Because theatre workers are less likely to be in work for 26 weeks, this period is reduced (to about 16 weeks) making it possible for intermittent theatre workers, and other artists, to receive the full benefits accorded to workers in other industries. When the government proposed to change this regulation and divest les intermittents of their rights, they went on strike and succeeded in scuppering the 2003 Festival. At the same time, the prestigious Montpellier Dance and the Aix-en-Provence Opera Festival had to be cancelled too. >> Next page
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