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The Avignon Festival 2006 - A Personal Encounter (Part I)A Rumble Amongst Critics and the Historical Perspective (2)Jacqueline Fletcher visits the 60th Avignon FestivalDateline: 19th July, 2006The French are, of course, fiercely proud of their state-funded culture and rightly so. As the doyen of cultural critics, George Banu, said yesterday during one of the organised discussions, artists such as Peter Brook (from the UK) and Josef Nadj (from Hungary) come to France to live and work because here they can expect the type of support, artistic freedom and generosity of funding they would not enjoy in their own countries (1). Nadj, who is the artistic associate this year, is a good example. Born in the former Yugoslavia, after studying art history and music in Budapest he came to Paris in 1980 at the age of 23 to study with Marcel Marceau, Etienne Decroux (corporal mime) and at Jacque Lecoq's school of physical actor training. Nadj stayed on and very quickly found critical acclaim and funding for his own company. His performance style is eclectic and somewhat surreal: he works with dancers, circus artists, painters, sculptors and butoh practitioners. Besides the choreography, he makes films of his work and has exhibitions of his photography and etchings. In 1995 he was made artistic director of the National Centre for Choreography in Orleans and in 2006, as associate artist, he moulds one of the most prestigious festivals in the world into its artistic shape, with his own production Asobu taking pride of place on the largest and most important stage in France - the Cour d'Honneur of the mediaeval Papal Palace. Over the years, Peter Brook has been a regular and significant contributor to the Festival, opening up new spaces for theatrical experience, such as the Carrière de Boulbon (a disused limestone quarry about 20 km from Avignon which is now used every year), as well as new narrative territories. He has a piece at the Festival again this year, and he echoes Banu's sentiments. Born in the UK, he attended Cambridge University before starting work in the post-war period as a very young director at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. After some considerable controversy in the '60s surrounding his experimental work, in particular his Artaudian Theatre of Cruelty season at the RSC, his support for Grotowski and the now legendary A Midsummer Night's Dream, he was invited to France by Jean-Louis Barrault. In France he was offered funding for his International Centre for Theatre Research and France's gain has become Britain's loss. After thirty years of funding from the French government for his theatrical experiments, the grand old man of the theatre has achieved an iconic status throughout the world which is largely denied him in his country of birth. It is unlikely that he would have achieved this status if he'd had to fill out Arts Council application forms for the trip around Africa with a large troupe of actors in search of a universal language of theatre (that resulted in The Conference of Birds), and the years of explorations and workshops leading up to the epic Mahabharata, to mention just two important productions, or for his celebrated theatre, the Bouffe du Nord which attracts talented performers from all over the globe. After last year's Festival fracas the French are out in full force debating the value of their culture for contemporary society: in some respects it seems like a damage limitation exercise. The ferocity of the outcry against the 2005 programme came as something of a shock in artistic circles. The Festival has always been surrounded by polemics, conflicts and crises. As Liberation puts it, one goes to Avignon to find out what is going on in the world, to get the most recent accounts from the perspective of those who dare to go beyond superficial appearances and "break the mirror of certainty and indifference" (2). The Festival has a loyal following among those who expect to be challenged. (1) Regards Critiques, Qu'est-ce qu'on cherche ailleurs? (What does one look for elsewhere?) Cloître St Louis, 17 July 2006. (2) René Solis, "Bousculer", Liberation, Edition Spéciale, 7 July 2006, p. II. >> Next page
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