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The Avignon Festival 2006 - A Personal Encounter (Part I)A Rumble Amongst Critics and the Historical Perspective (3)Jacqueline Fletcher visits the 60th Avignon FestivalDateline: 19th July, 2006As this is the 60th 'edition' of the event, the opportunities for cultural scrutiny, historical enquiry and justifications seem to be well-placed. Festivals abound in France, but Avignon is special: it is a showcase for all of France's cultural pieties and artistic aspirations. It has a special place in the hearts of the French; it represents the cultural history of post-war France in a nutshell. It was the conceptual child of one of France's best-loved cultural icons, actor/director/artistic director Jean Vilar. In 1947, the still young Vilar was invited to Avignon to stage something appropriate to accompany an exhibition of contemporary art (Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Léger etc) by Yvonne and Christian Zervos in the Palais des Papes. That first year, in the space of a week, he staged three traditional theatre pieces in the Cour d'Honneur but in his heart he was setting something much grander in motion. He wanted the annual event to be a meeting place for artists and public. It was to play a role in re-shaping the arts in France after the suppression of the Nazi Occupation. And, most crucially, it was to be central to the process of democratisation and decentralisation of the arts in post-war France. Vilar was at the fulcrum of this post-war policy which would take the arts out into the provinces and engage with a new audience. He was one the most fervent supporters of the TNP (Théâtre National Populaire), state funded regional theatres, which were joined over the years by regional theatre schools, cultural centres, national choreography centres and museums of modern art which were under the artistic direction of France's cultural alumni. Paris was no longer to be the pivotal point of the nation's arts. The traditional bourgeois consumers of culture would be replaced by what was then referred to as the 'non-public'. The arts would embrace the new, reach out to new territories and people and Avignon was central to this process of decentralisation, democratisation and popularisation of the arts. So, in 2005 when Le Figaro published the headline "Le Public en Colère" (Angry Audiences), it was pointing to a supposed betrayal of all the ideals of post-war French culture as symbolised by the utopian vision of Vilar. Fabre's programme favoured his fellow Flemish artists, illustrious experimental choreographer Wim Vandekeybus, Jan Decorte, Jan Lauwers, controversial performance artist Marina Abramovic, multidisciplinary arts (cross-overs of video, music, text, graphics, installations) and his own very visceral and violent imagery in two productions Je Suis Sang (I am Blood) and L'Histoire du Larmes (The History of Tears) on the sacred trestles of the Cour d'Honneur. While there were some productions of text-based theatre, classics such as Buchner's Danton's Death and Brecht's Galileo Galilei, and plays by contemporary writers such as Sarah Kane, the right-wing press lamented the absence of 'classical theatre' (i.e. text-based theatre) in the Cour d'Honneur itself. In fact, Avignon 2005 was a catalyst for something more profound, something brewing for quite some time. As the left-wing national daily Liberation put it:
The right-wing press and traditional critics have been accused of 'assassination' and the fact that the programme attracted record attendances from loyal audiences has been cited as evidence for a storm-in-a-tea-cup reaction from the reactionaries. Liberation referred to the scandal as a 'psychodrama' and used it as evidence that the Avignon Festival is in actual fact doing very well indeed. Nonetheless, this year's 60th 'edition' finds supporters of the Festival and (post)modernist forms on the defensive. At a series of events organised under the banner 'Le Festival D'Avignon, Une Histoire en Mouvement' this quarrel with the traditionalists has been manifest even if only below the surface. At the forum L'Evolution Des Formes Esthétiques Théâtrales, the cultural historian Antoine De Baecque pointed out that Vilar had always been a proponent of a cross-fertilization between artistic forms, a theatrical renewer par excellence and everyone knew that he was referring to the critical attacks on last year's programme. (2) If you look at Vilar's track record, De Baecque would seem to be right. Vilar never intended the Festival to be solely a safe showcase for the works of Racine, Corneille and Shakespeare. He set the tone for artistically and socially challenging work himself in 1948 when, just three years after the war, he directed Danton's Death, a play by a German about the failure of the French Revolution in the Cour d'Honneur. Avignon had suffered badly under the Nazi occupation and, moreover, Büchner's critique of Robespierre was to be staged in the very courtyard where in 1793 Madame Guillotine had sixty hostages taken in reprisal for an assassination attempt on one of Robespierre's representatives. This precipitated the first crisis, the first polarisation of points of view, when the Festival was only a year old. (3) But the outcry failed to derail Vilar's vision of artistic renewal. On a bare stage Vilar achieved what one critic referred to at the time as "the birth of a new theatrical aesthetic in the open air". (4) He envisaged the Festival as a place where (theatre) artists and audiences would meet each other for a fruitful exchange of ideas in order that the arts would develop organically away from traditional and stultifying forms of expression to engage with forms that could comment on the world around us. The Festival would be a liberated space, far from the constraints of traditional cultural dialogues, where artistic freedom would be respected. Nonetheless, during the period immediately following the war, it was difficult to imagine the trajectory which theatre in Europe would follow later after the cultural revolutions of the '60s. Perhaps, it would have been impossible to envisage the complexity of the late 20th century world with its technical innovations, devastating wars and social upheavals, globalisation and global warming, migrations, materialism and mediatization, along with the transformation of all forms of scrutiny and constraint. Inevitably, during the utopian decades following the war, it would have been impossible to predict an evolution of theatrical forms that would be a response to these changes; forms that would be needed to raise questions artistically about the experience of this not-so-brave new world. Vilar's work, avant garde in its day, remained resolutely text-based, though it was under Vilar's direction, which lasted until 1971, that the works of the Absurdists entered the canon and Avignon was equally to become a place where the most modernist of French and international directors could bring their work to a public eager for something new and challenging. (1) Quoted from Antoine de Baecque "05 Crispation Antimoderne", Liberation, edition spéciael, Friday 7 July 2006, p. VII. (2) Les Rencontres de la 60e Edition, Gymnase Lycée St. Joseph, 13 July 2006. (3) Antoine de Baecque, Liberation, Edition Spéciale, p.II. (4) Marthe Robert, quoted by Antoine de Baecque, "Un Festival de polémique: esthétiques ou politiques, les querelles, parfois violentes, ont jalonné l'histoire du festival. Recit de huit temps fort de l'agitation en Avignon", Liberation, Edition Spéciale, 7 July 2006, p. II. >> Next page
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