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The Avignon Festival 2006 - A Personal Encounter (Part II)The Artistic Associate and the Programming (1)Jacqueline Fletcher visits the 60th Avignon FestivalDateline: 26th July, 2006Unlike the Edinburgh Festival, Avignon has a different designated artist each year who collaborates with the young festival directors, Vincent Baudriller and Hortense Archambault (1). The associate artist for 2006 festival is the multi-talented choreographer Josef Nadj. It is Nadj's taste, his aesthetic, his thematic preoccupations that give the festival its artistic core. Perhaps, it would be more apt to say that it is the accumulation of Nadj's life experiences and his mode of organising these in the artistic process, contemplation, philosophy and practice, which is apparent at the festival this year. He is something of a wanderer, living in self-imposed exile from Eastern Europe and travelling regularly around the world for inspiration. Perhaps for this reason, the concept of crossing national borders, crossing cultural and disciplinary boundaries seems to be something of a thread running through much of the work presented this year. Bartabas's equestrian gypsy circus, Mnouchkine's Le Dernier Caravansérail, Koltès Black Battles with Dogs, Nadj's own Asobu, Lauwer's La Poursuite du Vent, Hirata's Gens de Séoul, Brouwer's Rouge Decante, Kaegi's Cargo Sofia-Avignon are all concerned in one way or another with people who live or have lived in exile and the theme is apparent in the presence or the work of other participants as well. In many other respects, Nadj is an interesting choice for the role of artistic associate as he is very much a multi-disciplinary artist. He brings with him the sense of 'otherness' incumbent on his status as an ethnic Hungarian born in Serbia. He did his compulsory military service in Yugoslavia, attended art college and studied fine art and music at the university of Budapest where he first acquired a taste for corporeal arts. He studied martial arts before moving to Paris to study corporeal mime and dance. Nonetheless, he claims that his greatest love is music, in particular jazz, and, given the talent, he would have become a musician. He also asserts that he gleans the inspiration for his physical and visual work from literature, from the written word. Like so many practitioners of theatre in contemporary Europe, he started out as a 'plastic' artist and yet he has been drawn to performance. He trained with renowned 'theatrical' choreographers such as Mark Tompkins and François Verret and so his first company was called 'le Théâtre Jel'. He is referred to as a choreographer, but the term seems inadequate to describe his work. (1) Since Vilar the Festival has had three directors in total control of the event in Vilarian fashion, but after the resignation of Bernard Favier D'Arcy in 2002, there has been a different format. >> Next page
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