Orgy in Avignon. What the theater festival told about the West

It could not have been better to find something that united the subsequent parade of moral and mental deviations, in the mirror of which a person was dismantled to the darkest corners of the soul. The glorification of physical or spiritual death, as the only possible way out, in the prologue of the theatrical holiday in itself made us think about the non-randomness of the choice of plot

Part I Avignon IN

On Wednesday, February 6, the director of the famous Avignon Festival, Olivier Pi, received the Legion of Honor for services to culture. The awarding took place in the presence of the "first lady" of the French state, Brigitte Macron, and other members of the elite. Minister of Culture Frank Riester greeted the new member of the order on Twitter with the words: “Dear Olivier Pi, thank you for the light you bring with every curtain rise. Thank you for your tireless efforts in fulfilling the ambitious task that we share with you: the desire to open the doors of culture to everyone, both artists and spectators..

Belonging to the Order of the Legion of Honor is the highest honorary distinction of the French Republic, which is given for outstanding services. What reflects the light brought by Olivier Py, what are his outstanding services to France, and what has become of a cultural phenomenon founded in the last century on progressive and democratic principles, under his leadership, will allow you to understand a small retrospective of the theater forum held by Olivier Py last year .

From 6 to 29 July 2018, the largest international theater festival in Avignon (France) was held for the 72nd time. Traditionally, the forum was divided into the official Avignon IN, within the framework of which the audience watched 40 productions, and the alternative Avignon OFF. The latter was attended by 1,000 amateur and communal theaters, which showed 1,300 performances. The number of spectators of the theatrical forum reached 50,000 people. In terms of the number of visitors and prestige, the Avignon Festival really has no analogues in the world.

If the theme of the official festival is compressed by certain ideological guidelines, then Avignon OFF is more democratic. There are no differences between professional and amateur theaters, except that the latter put on performances and come at their own expense. For many regional troupes, this is a unique opportunity to receive contracts and funding, to express themselves on a national and even international scale. 3500 producers, directors and journalists came to the festival in search of talents. According to the main website of Avignon www.festival-avignon.com, the festival is "the largest art market, during which the city is covered with flyers and posters, and troupes invite the viewer right on the streets". Nevertheless, the viewer somehow finds his way in this chaos, getting acquainted with the program from reviews and announcements, or relying on his intuition.

The Avignon Festival was founded in 1947 by the French director and actor Jean Vilard, who remained its permanent director until his death (1971). From 1951 to 1963 Jean Vilar also headed the National People's Theater (TNP), which did a lot to democratize theatrical art in France. He sought to acquaint the general public with classical works in a good setting. Louis Aragon spoke about the high level of the theater. By making ticket prices affordable and introducing a subscription system, he allowed many who had previously been deprived of this opportunity to approach the culture. Jean Vilar believed that the theater could not stand outside of politics and opposed the war in Algeria.

The festival remains politically engaged even today. Only its ideological orientation has changed beyond recognition.

On July 24, at the closing of the official part, Olivier Pi gave a detailed press conference about the goals of the festival. In particular, he said that the main issue that concerns the French intelligentsia today is the fate of various, and especially "gender minorities", and he intends to expand the boundaries of the discussion of this topic in such a way that "to touch everyone" . He urged to pay special attention to youth.

Olivier Pi spoke in detail about the main, from his point of view, problems of our time that art should deal with: “This year we have chosen the gender issue as the main theme of the festival. … We also fought for women and feminism in a lot of plays. … We fought for a gender issue that affects everyone, and especially for the identity of transgender people, for their rights. We fought for LGBT rights (CI? - this is an acronym for terms from an ever-expanding list of gender identity violations - ed.) This is a huge community that affects everyone and which is still illegal in several countries of the world. We have fought for refugees, who some call migrants, many performances have spoken about this problem. This struggle intersected with the struggle for communities of LGBT and women. We fought for Europe at a time when Europe does not believe in itself. Naturally, we fought for a cultural Europe, and not the dictates of financiers. We have fought and are fighting for national education. … We fought for a man named Kirill Serebrennikov, who is under house arrest pending trial, probably for political reasons.” Also, according to Olivier Pi, they fought “for the people of Gaza, against terrible prison conditions, against patriarchy and wild capitalism…” In general, this would be the usual confused leftist discourse, if it were not for the colossal administrative possibilities in the hands of this person. Of particular concern was the fact that it was decided to direct the main onslaught of propaganda to young people.

The belligerent tone of the art director's speech sounded somewhat unusual at a cultural event, and the repeated word "struggle" implied the presence of some kind of cultural front.

However, the French director has been waging his war for a long time, and he has never hidden his positions. Despite the sometimes controversial attitude towards his art, Olivier Py achieved fame as a director, actor and founder of the theater, "combining Christian mysticism with Dionysian madness." Showing the versatility of talent, he performed in jazz clubs and cabarets under the pseudonym "Miss Knife" as a drag queen. The texts written by him are mainly devoted to "difficulties living in this world", pleasures, unhappy love and other personal problems. He published several books, the last of which, The Parisian, was recognized by some literary critics "infantile and unreadable", while glossy magazines with a cultural theme presented it as the best novel of the season. As a political journalist, he took an active part in the anti-Serb campaign, defended illegal migration and homosexual "marriages". Since 2013 - permanent art director of the festival in Avignon.

According to his priorities, a significant, if not most, part of the performances was devoted to the tragic fate of people with sexual identity problems and other deviations, as well as feminists and migrants, that is, the entire set of politically correct topics.

The honor of opening the festival went to the internationally renowned French director and actor Thomas Jolly, who chose one of Seneca's darkest tragedies, Fiesta, for this. With the onset of night, the action began on the main stage of the Avignon Festival in the papal palace.

The tragedies of Seneca, who worked in the cruel times of Caligula and Nero, speak of the impossibility of the victory of morality over sinful passions and blows of fate. The deep disappointment of the philosopher is especially acute in this tragedy, where the author sees only death as a way out of the tragic contradiction. Exclamation of the choir from the tragedy of Seneca - “He is greedy for life who does not want to die when the world is dying”- becomes the leitmotif of the entire festival.

When asked by a journalist about the choice of plot and why the actors were interested in playing villains, and Tom Jolly himself chose the worst of them, Atreus, the director answered as follows: “When actors play monsters, they look for something human in them ... Finding human in monsters, we ask ourselves a question and look for something monstrous in ourselves.” And indeed, the blackness of the human soul of Tom Jolly was fully conveyed. The staging with magnificent scenography, costumes and effects blew up the theater hall in the open air. Here is how one of the critics described the performance: _“Thomas Jolly, who plays the role of the main monster Atreus and director of Fiesta, reproduced the twilight, black tragedy of the Roman philosopher Seneca. It's a kitsch-influenced rock opera, overflowing with depressing, crazy redundancy. A wild odyssey to the depths of the roots, the terrible evil that everyone carries in himself.

The entire performance can be viewed.

"Fiest" became an event and set the tone for the festival that had begun. It could not have been better to find something that united the subsequent parade of moral and mental deviations, in the mirror of which a person was dismantled to the darkest corners of the soul. The glorification of physical or spiritual death, as the only possible way out, in the prologue of the theatrical holiday in itself made us think about the non-randomness of the choice of plot.

Here is a brief description of just a few performances from the program, which could characterize the general atmosphere of the forum. Judge for yourself.

"Ode to Try"- choreography by Jan Martens and "Ben and Luke"- the sensual pas de deux of dancers from Burkina Faso.

"Jellyfish"- naturalistic narrative about cannibalism and the animal nature of man, "the struggle with which will be eternal". (About the trial of those who escaped on the raft of the frigate "Medusa").

"Far Country"- adaptation by Christoph Rauk of the autobiographical novel by Jean-Luc Lagarce, who died of AIDS at 38. The production was attended by graduates of the theater school of Lille. The plot of the story: a young homosexual man who is aware of the approach of death wants to say goodbye to his loved ones. He, as it were, returns to his parental home, where his inclinations are not approved and they “do not understand” him. In this "distant country" there is a meeting not only with living, but already dead relatives. In addition, there is also the whole host of his former lovers, with whom the showdown continues. Christoph Rauck said this about the choice of the piece: “I did not expect to meet so much humanism in a theatrical play. We have all experienced or experienced the emotions and situations described by Jean-Luc Lagarce at one time or another. He reminds me of Chekhov". With a light hand, the director Lagarce is now called the "modern Chekhov."

"And why should I speak like you?" To prepare this performance, the actress Anouk Greenberg went in search of "raw texts" in shelters, insane asylums, in the circles of hell of the destitute and forgotten people. She found old documents archived by the medical staff, letters from the residents of the homes of sorrow. She reads them in a soft, well-placed voice. Sometimes the texts are simply heartbreaking, similar to a prayer, others are filled with hope, they have only one thing in common - that no one will answer them.

"Some have never seen the sea"- a saga about the dramatic fate of young Japanese women who came to the United States to become the wives of Japanese immigrants. We are talking about their disenfranchised and hopeless life, which became more complicated with the start of the war between Japan and the United States.

Another performance on anti-patriarchal themes was brought by a director from Egypt. In a play "Mother" it is said that being the guardians of the "Patriarchal Temple", women in the Egyptian family are subjected to daily humiliation. From the author's point of view, they give themselves up to "voluntary slavery" from which there is no way out.

Attention was also attracted by the work of Olivier Pi himself - "Antigone" Sophocles, which he realized with the prisoners of the prison of Avignon. All roles in the play are played by men. As critics write, despite unprofessional diction, the prisoners play sincerely, the daily struggle for "dignity" in terrible French prisons is close to them.

"Trance"- Staged by Didier Ruiz. The word is presented to seven transsexuals who, throughout the performance, talk about the transition from one borderline state to another.

"He can always say it's for the love of the prophet" In a theatrical oratorio directed by Iran, Gurshad Shaiman tells the drama of young people who fled the Maghreb and the Middle East because of their sexual orientation.

"Dry Season"- a tough matriarchal ritual in which the leader of the Nova nova troupe Fia Menard, a man with a violation of sexual identity, who after therapy took the form of a woman, declares war on the norm and patriarchy. The play begins with a scene in which seven naked women, legs apart, lie under the pressure of a low ceiling, which moves vertically regardless of their will. According to the director's intention, this should symbolize enslavement, the only way to free oneself from which is a rebellion against society.

According to a French critic: “In the visually stunning set design of The Dry Season, a ritual of destruction of the patriarchal home is performed. Determined to end male oppression, Fia Menard demonstrates a vengeful force without, however, avoiding stereotypes. "I'm slapping your pussy" - the first words of the play, spoken by Fia Menard, sound like a declaration of war. In response to these obscene words, which many women probably heard in the alley, and which are a symbol of the dominance of men who have turned public space into hostile territory, the leader of the Nova nova troupe decided to quit the game (change sex). Heavy artillery, capable of firing red balls at the patriarchy… An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”.

And here you involuntarily notice that despite the emphatically victimized images of most theatrical productions, someone’s roar is already heard from behind them, allowing himself to threaten society in the language of the gateway. Someone declares war on modern culture and the image of man in it, calls for the victory of archaic instincts over human essence, revels in sin and vice. This subject, similar to the characters from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, creates an orgy of "return". Fighting with the patriarchy, he is engaged in the destruction of that thin cultural layer, the creation of which humanity has spent tens of thousands of years. It should be noted that this large-scale project is being carried out with the full support of the elites, the confusion of the humanistic intelligentsia and the non-resistance of the people.

Whether the agenda of the largest theatrical forum is exhausted by "gender" and how the theatrical outback lives - about this in the second part of the Avignon OFF article.

The oldest theater festival in Europe never ceases to amaze the audience with fresh ideas and new talents.

The Avignon Festival, founded by the outstanding theater director Jean Vilard, has been the main event of the French summer cultural calendar for half a century. On its stage, the audience gets acquainted with the premieres of the largest studios in Europe and learn about the latest trends in theatrical art.

The center of the Festival d "Avignon is traditionally the Courdoneur outdoor area in the courtyard of the legendary Papal Palace, which seats up to 2000 spectators. The main program of the theater festival is also shown on several additional stages in the vicinity of the Old City. About 20 art troupes from around the world perform here every year. In addition to drama, other forms of theatrical art are presented here - modern dance, musical, pantomime, puppet shows.The ticket price for the performance of the Avignon Festival is from 10 euros.

In addition to the main program, guests of the Avignon Festival get acquainted with the performances of the Festival du Off theater fair, similar to the famous one. The work of small and experimental groups is shown here every year, demonstrating their creations in squares, parks, nightclubs, churches, shops and cultural institutions throughout the city.

The most convenient way to get to Avignon is by high-speed train from Paris (3 hours on the way).

Avignon is very good, almost as good as Avignon, which I never tire of admiring. The city of Avignon is the administrative center of the department of Vaucluse, located in Provence, this is the south of France. We devoted only half a day to this city, during - this is very little for such a picturesque city with a very rich history, many significant museums.

The biggest attraction of Avignon is, of course, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, like the entire historical center, I devoted a separate article to the palace. But the old city itself is very, very picturesque and interesting.

In Avignon, the ancient three-meter walls of the 13th-14th centuries have been preserved almost entirely, only in some places breaks were made in them for convenience. The walls were built during the Avignon captivity of the Popes, to protect the curia during that difficult period.

Walls of Avignon

I would love to just walk along the walls on foot under other circumstances, they are so good, and also the numerous gates are good. flowerbeds and even installations in a modern style in front of the walls. Too bad I didn't take pictures of it all.

Since 1947, theater festivals have been held in Avignon, we just happened to find the festival. This is probably one of the finest additions to the magnificent architecture and rich history. The theater festival brings an indescribable feeling of celebration and fun.

Photo: (c) Christophe Raynaud De Lage

The art of taming: the "Avignon Festival - 2017" has ended

One of the largest and most significant theater festivals on the planet, Festival d "Avignon, ended in the south of France. According to the summed up results of the organizers, 300 performances at 39 venues were shown at the festival in 20 days, in total 152 thousand spectators from all over the world visited the form. Fontanka correspondent was among them.

Festival d "Avignon is not just the largest, but also the oldest international European theater festival with a rich history. It was organized in 1947 by the famous French director Jean Vilar, a supporter of the popular theater, theater for the people - as an art therapy for the post-war depression that spread at that time time in Europe. For the same reason, he settled precisely in the south of France. In the early years, only French and at the same time more or less traditional theaters gathered for the festival. For which Vilar was first accused of revolutionary-minded criticism of "nationalism" and even "Stalinism" , and then, when he began to actively invite theaters from other European countries - in "cosmopolitanism".Theatrical revolutionaries, meanwhile, decided to organize their off-program in Avignon - as opposed to "routine" - and did this in 1967 in the courtyard of the Carmelite monastery XIV century, despite the fact that the main venue for the Vilar festival was the Cour d "Honneur of the Papal Palace (Avignon is considered the official seat of the popes since 1308). So there was a double program of the festival - the In program and the off program.

After the death of Vilar, the festival did not die out, but continued to develop. It experienced its most significant flourishing when for 10 years - until 2013 inclusive - the program directors of the official program were Vincent Baudrillet and Hortense Archambault, who collected the cream of the modern world theater, moreover, it was of a revolutionary nature, that is, the performances of directors who were actively engaged in the search for radical new forms and new language. Under Baudrier and Arshabmaud, Romeo Castellucci, Cathy Mitchell, Jan Fabre, Krzysztof Warlikowski, the Rimini Protokoll group and many other headliners of the world theater process became regulars at the Festival d "Avignon, and the spontaneous off-program was annually compiled by just" theaters for the people ", according to their own initiative coming to Avignon, buying up advertising space, renting venues for performances at their own expense and inviting people to their performances themselves.

So if one of your theatrical friends tells you that he took part in the Avignon Festival, do not rush to admire and congratulate - first ask which program he participated in: In or Off.

On the other hand, it is these posters that completely cover the walls of medieval buildings, dressing sidewalk bollards, playing the role of tablecloths on tables in cafes, as well as groups of people in various costumes, arranging mini-performances in front of restaurants, putting flyers into your hands on narrow streets, distracting you from your morning coffee in a cafe to endless stories about performances, and create that special atmosphere of the Avignon festival that you will not find anywhere else in the world. The city lives a festival life around the clock (see photo report), the crowds on the streets do not dry up until five in the morning, public transport does not stop running until about the same time, and it is completely incomprehensible how standard regular buses manage to maneuver in narrow streets and even between rows cars parked on each side. Every night, returning from the last performance - it usually began at 10-11 pm and ended well after midnight, for the simple reason that theatrical lighting "works" only in complete darkness, and most of the venues in Avignon are open, these are the courtyards of medieval monasteries, churches, lyceums - I watched the maneuvers of the bus from the window, and it was a sight no less exciting than a good Hollywood action.

Tamers of words, or Roads of exiles

As for the main program, with the arrival of the former head of the Odeon theater in Paris, director and playwright Olivier Pi, she became more calm in terms of experiments with the arrival of the art director of Festival d "Avignon. And, obviously, not in last place for Monsieur Pi, when compiling the Avignon 2017 poster, turned out to be the problem of political correctness, in other words, the problem of immigrants.

Only one performance is directly devoted to this topic - "Saigon" by a young French stage director of Vietnamese origin Carolina Gwiela Nguyen. This is a production by her own company, Les Hommes Approximatifs (The Approximate People), which has been in existence for seven years now. Carolina and her like-minded people are collecting deeply personal, intimate stories of people associated with geopolitical cataclysms. "Saigon" is dedicated to the family history of Carolina herself, who was born in Paris from a mixed marriage of an immigrant from Vietnam, who fled from Saigon after the French were leaving it in 1954, and a native Frenchman. The idea of ​​creating such a performance was born when the director and her mother went to their historical homeland and asked her to bargain in the market. The mother spoke in her native language, which was met with good-natured laughter by the sellers, explaining to Carolina that the language in which her mother speaks is long gone. “It shocked me,” Carolina Nguyen told the Liberation newspaper, “that my mother thinks and speaks not even in a different language, but in a different time.” Another wording that struck the director was heard by her from one of the interviewed refugees in Paris: "My son is my first close foreigner in my life." “We are really foreigners for our mothers - there is a deep drama in this,” Carolina emphasized. And the play "Saigon", according to her, was born because she suddenly wanted to see the Vietnamese on stage, to hear their language.

The scenery of the performance is a pavilion in which a Vietnamese restaurant called "Saigon" fits in, recreated in the most detailed way, to the details: a kitchen perched on the left and a spacious hall for visitors. The plot is reminiscent of a Mexican TV series - people quarrel, reconcile, get married, children do not understand their parents and vice versa - but the director does not lose a key theme for her in any episode: the son not only does not understand his mother, he does not understand the mother, who suddenly turns to him -Vietnamese, and another young Vietnamese woman falls into hysterics when she accidentally sees that her boyfriend sings from the restaurant stage in French and for the French. The point here is that a young man who has forgotten his native language is a character of the 90s, and a patriotic heroine is of the 50s. The action jumps between the middle and the end of the last century. And, despite the fact that there are amateurs among the Vietnamese artists (the director, according to her, could not find as many ethnic theater professionals as she needed), the actors play masterfully. Bringing to the audience the pain, despair, impotence of ordinary people in the face of global political upheavals. One of the best roles in the play is the image of an elderly cook named Maria, who waits the whole performance for her son, with whom fate divorced them during the escape, to be found, but closer to the finale she learns from one of the restaurant visitors, a Frenchwoman, the wife of a big official, that her son died - played just by an amateur actress, who in reality works as a cook. Carolina Gwiela Nguyen tells a curious story: all the time the performance is going on, she fails to convince the performer that after the scene when the jealous husband of the restaurant owner breaks into the kitchen and turns it upside down, she does not rush to clean this kitchen, that fitters will do it. “No, he destroyed my kitchen,” the performer laments, and immediately begins to clean up the mess on her own.

The tolerant French do not use this term for immigrants, and they are not called refugees either. To emphasize the passive nature of the situations of these people (in the sense in which there are “passive participles”, participles describing an action performed on an object by another person), they use the combination en exil - in exile, expelled. It is this expression that is found in the French translation (NB: there are no other translations other than French at the Avignon Festival, it happened historically, only this year for the first time glasses were tested at a few performances, allowing you to read the text of the translation in English, but they had to be order well in advance and they are used in test mode so far) during Kathy Mitchell's performance "The Maids" based on the well-known (including in Russia staged by Roman Viktyuk) play by Jean Genet about two maids who planned to poison their mistress, but did not succeed in this venture, as a result of which one of her own choice went to the next world, and the other to prison.

Photo: (c) Christophe Raynaud De Lage

English director Cathy Mitchell has been demonstrating an excellent creative form with almost no failures for two decades now, working mainly in Germany. She became famous, in particular, for her original use of video, which in her performances is not an online broadcast of what is happening on the stage, not an enlargement of plans and not an opportunity for the viewer to look into those nooks and crannies of space that are inaccessible to the audience's gaze from the audience. Mitchell began to shoot video as a parallel reality, closely connected with the reality of the performances, as a montage of associations - sometimes the characters, sometimes the director himself - illustrating the hidden plans of events, personal and situational. However, Kathy herself put an end to these experiments, officially declaring their completion. In The Maids, directed by Mitchell in Holland, there is no video at all in the theater company Toneelgroep Amsterdam, but there are unexpected plot twists. The maids turn out to be Polish emigrants, and Madame is a transvestite with a disgusting disposition. The absence of a video did not at all cancel Katie Mitchell's amazing gift for bringing out the deep inner dramas of the characters: the staged ritual of turning a man into a woman is impressive not only in jewelry, but also in the feeling of absolute naturalness of what is happening - with tightening the corset, establishing an artificial breast and "disappearing" the most outstanding part of the male body - but also the inevitable and also quite natural torments of two maids who came from one of the most religious countries in the world and plunged into a uniform nativity scene. I emphasize: there is no pathos, no hypocrisy, no fanabery - there is a very understandable genetic rejection of someone else's eccentric lifestyle, which Claire and Solange are doomed to serve. Existential exile is enhanced by the fact that the director endows Claire with consumption, so that her decision to drink the poisoned linden tea prepared for Madame, and the monologue uttered by Solange over her friend, dressed in the white dress of the mistress and reclining on the feather beds of the hostess, is departing to another world, is unequivocally perceived as rite of liberation. Including, and thanks to the excellent work of the actors, who learned the Polish language for greater authenticity of the images.

Photo: (c) Christophe Raynaud De Lage

By the way, about the language. It is worth noting that the European theater is moving quite tangibly and confidently towards verbality from excessive visuality. There are almost no performances “no speech” and “few speech” on the poster - if these are not creations of a plastic sense, like the works of the Sicilian director Emma Dante and the Greek director Dimitris Papaioannou, which are discussed below. For the most part, theatrical writers have ceased to shy away from words - the text from the stage sounds so much that the running line of the translation does not keep up with them. But it must be admitted that not only the guests of the festival who do not know the language, but also the native French admit that they read only a third of the translation on average, preferring to look at “speaking poses, gestures, mise-en-scenes”. Of course, it’s not bad to understand that in the play “The Cabal of the Saints. The Life of Monsieur de Molière" based on Bulgakov's texts of the living classic of the German theater Frank Castorff, who put him under the eyeballs of his reign in the Berlin Volksbühne, Louis XIV, provoking and humiliating the archbishop in every possible way, also presses on him with Molière's text from "The Crazy Jourdain" - the very one who where the idiotic hero is helped to make the "great discovery" that he speaks in prose. But even without that, the video sequence leaves no doubts about the interpretations. And the game of technical and ironic actors, brought up by Castorf, allows you to watch in one breath a six-hour action about a brilliant artist - an eternal martyr and exile, who is rewarded both from the authorities, and from hypocrites at all levels, and from women, and from admirers only " a million torments." "The Cabal of the Saints" was played in the Parc des Expositions, a twenty-minute drive from the center of Avignon: on a giant stage strewn with sawdust (what authorities did not think that the artist should be tamed like circus animals), three pavilion in the baroque style, but the action begins with the fact that Stalin calls the main character, and he sends him to hell. Molière, Bulgakov, Castorff himself, with whom the authorities of Berlin did not even think of renewing the contract, motivating their actions by the director’s retirement age and barbarously destroying the best theater in Germany - they all turn out to be twin brothers in the performance, and centuries distant from each other fold like the pages of a nursery harmonica books, and turn out to be one single time of the artist, uncomfortable for him, not accepting his prophecies, stubbornly and invariably driving him out of the theater, out of the state, and even out of life altogether. When Castorf went to bow, the audience - after six, I repeat, hours of action - burst into a half-hour ovation, and when Castorf walked backstage for a long time through the dimensionless space of the stage, without turning around, many took handkerchiefs out of their bags and wiped away tears. There was a complete coincidence of theater and reality, which happens only with great Masters.

Photo: (c) Christophe Raynaud De Lage

A little less time - almost five hours - was the performance of Ibsen Huis by Australian Simon Stone, a novice director, but already noticed by the public and critics. Ibsen's House, like Katie Mitchell's The Maids, is a product of Toneelgroep Amsterdam. Stone did a great painstaking work, collecting the text of his own work from the numerous plots of the Norwegian playwright Ibsen, which are immediately read by theater connoisseurs, and the rest may well be omitted: the plot is quite valuable in itself. A half-century-long performance about the history of one family (this is the third performance where time jumps back and forth through decades like a flea, which only increases the dramatic tension) is packaged in a two-story house that rotates around its axis in front of the audience, opening up to the public's eyes - just like a video camera Castorfa in the previous performance - all the interiors and all the family secrets, on which the plot is twisted. Crime, recognition, suicide, incest, love triangle, etc - would be enough for five series, but Stone's performance is not like a series. Detailed acting allows you to explore destinies, build causal relationships from generation to generation and talk about the saga genre.

Photo: (c) Christophe Raynaud De Lage

Theater has also ceased to be afraid of large genres, just as it has ceased to be afraid of the abundance of text - on the contrary, it relies on them. Even a children's story called "Sorrows and Joys in the Life of Giraffes" based on a play by the Portuguese director and playwright Thiago Rodriguez is staged as a game of materialization of words, in which quite global issues are raised. It is with the help of words in this performance that things and heroes in general become very concrete things and heroes. A mini-lecture about “not a seagull in general, but a very specific thing that is very important to me and therefore it became my work” is read from the stage by a character named Chekhov, and the actors throughout the performance embody his lessons - they talk about something very important for them, from politics to pedophilia, starting with the words: “It's me. I am a giraffe” - and nothing more is needed, no scenery, no costumes: the characters and the scene are dressed directly in words, awakening the audience's imagination. Well, perhaps for the sake of a theatrical joke, one of the artists will suddenly put on an absurd bearish jumpsuit from a children's matinee.

Photo: (c) Christophe Raynaud De Lage

The name of the playwright of the children's play is not mentioned by chance. It was Thiago Rodriguez, who relatively recently headed the National Theater in Lisbon, who staged the most conceptual performance of Festival d "Avignon - 2017: Sopro (French Suffle, a noun with the same root as the word "prompter", Russian. Breath). This is a symbiosis of documentary and writing theater - a curious, though, perhaps, a little drawn-out reflection on the theater in general.The hero of the performance, Christina Vidal, a corpulent lady in black trousers, a shirt and with a white sheet in her hands, does not leave the stage from the beginning to the end of the action.Moreover, she is a real prompter The National Theater - continues to do its direct job - to give cues to the characters, but in the course of action from a purely functional unit it becomes a demiurge, changing the texts of the classics in accordance with the life situations of the artists of her theater, whose fates are seen by the prompter as a meta-play.

Photo: (c) Christophe Raynaud De Lage

At the key moments of the action, according to the director’s idea, thunder should rumble and lightning flash over the stage, and it was at this time in the open space - the courtyard of the already mentioned Karmalite monastery - that the strongest mistral, familiar to a number of southern French cities, blew. The wind blew the light white curtains of the scenery up to the grates, opening the backstage, and as if acting in concert with the prompter, like the hero of some very universal play, in which the spectators themselves unexpectedly became participants.

A more obvious magic of words, theatrical magic, is generally hard to imagine.

Naked people, or Vivat deconstruction!

However, there were also two significant performances at the festival without words at all, but very eloquently expressing themselves in the language of plastic, very original. These are "Monsters of the Stage" by an experienced director from Sicily Emma Dante and "The Great Tamer" by an artist from Greece Dimitris Papaioannou. In both works, there are naked people on the stage, both directors use these bodies as source material for new structures - professing the principle of "inventive deconstruction" proclaimed by the key contemporary philosopher Jacques Derrida, but they do it in completely different ways. At the same time, each in his own way (and again, following the logic of Derrida) are struggling with the main vice of today's consciousness - dogmatism.

Emma Dante immediately deprives her team of actors of any protection: as soon as they go on stage in bright clothes, they immediately throw off these clothes and remain in what their mother gave birth - but since the characters are on stage, and not, say, in a bathhouse, nudity, no matter how it will sound paradoxical, immediately becomes their “clothing”, provoking a flow of corresponding associations. Naked people on a bare stage - and in the performance there are also no scenery or music - with their defenselessness they resemble animals, children or fools, and they immediately turn on the herd reflex, which most of the stage time looks like a carnival light and funny. But the main idea of ​​Emma Dante's work is not at all funny: all the reactions of these people on the stage are the reactions of the herd, right up to the final scene, when the characters are standing, clinging to each other, not knowing where to expect danger - the reactions of people reduced to an animal state, which in our modern reality are, alas, not so rare.

Photo: (c) Christophe Raynaud De Lage

Dimitris Papaioannou's "Great Tamer" is perhaps the most apolitical spectacle at this festival. And perhaps the most witty. Here the principles of deconstruction and anti-dogmatism reach an absurd limit in the most positive sense. Something, but Papaioanna's ingenuity is definitely not to be occupied. The stage, covered with rectangular rugs that run into each other like dragon scales, reveals many hidden hatches in the course of action. From there, not even bodies appear, but parts of bodies. The director uses them as a constructor, covering the parts of the bodies of the actors that are not necessary for any figure with black clothes. So, from two legs of different men and one female body, a magnificent centaur is obtained, and the legs and arms of a person who has appeared from the bowels of the earth can “roll” at a distance of several meters from each other and slide for a long time and slowly.

At the same time, the director himself gallops through the epochs. It takes him a few minutes to send the perfect body of an ancient youth to the anatomical theater of the Renaissance, where he is safely refreshed by arranging a meal from his insides. There are countless such jokes scattered around the play, and I must say that this is perhaps the only correct and noble occupation at the theater at the moment: to be a tamer of any dogmas and traditions - to ruthlessly rip open their guts, dismember into a thousand pieces from this "Lego" to build new theatrical reality.

Zhanna Zaretskaya, Avignon - Petersburg, Fontanka.ru

1. START

In 1947, the famous French actor and director Jean Vilar organized the first "Week of Dramatic Art" in Avignon and, inspired by its success, thought about the annual festival. He dreamed of creating a new theatre, more democratic, free, accessible to all segments of the population (even now, the organizers of the Avignon review, mindful of his precepts, do not raise ticket prices above 40 euros) and the appearance of another spectator - smart, modern, with progressive views and stable psyche, able to "digest" any experiments. Vilar was somewhat close to the postmodernists, who brought elitist art to the masses. He dreamed of “renovating the theatre… to open fresh air to art so that it would not suffocate in salons and basements; reunite architecture with drama." Since that time, the festival has been held in the open air, and performances are played in natural scenery (and often then turn out to be unimaginable without them and are not shown anywhere else).

Vilar invited young Gerard Philippe and Maria Cazares, who shone in Jean Cocteau's Orpheus, to the festival and to his troupe of the National Folk Theater, drastically reduced ticket prices, carefully built a repertoire, which, in addition to French classics, included performances by Kleist, Buchner and Brecht, and attracted the best artists and composers to participate in productions. At that moment, France was experiencing a spiritual and intellectual upsurge, and the Avignon Theater Festival became its reflection. Jean Vilar stayed at the head of the company until 1971.

2. PREMIER LABORATORY

Now the Avignon Festival is a large-scale theatrical forum, which art professionals consider as an open creative laboratory. Actual directors from different countries strive here, new trends are born here and the theatrical process is formed. The discovered finds are subsequently replicated around the world. Often, what seems ultra-modern at home no longer fits the format at the Avignon Festival. The official program of the festival includes about 40 performances, the unofficial one - more than 300, and there are also exhibitions, lectures, public discussions and round tables on theater and cultural policy, meetings with actors, readings of plays and scripts. There is no single general line that everyone is obliged to adhere to, among the participants there are people of opposite views and beliefs: politicized and not very politicized, cynics and dreamers, satirists and philosophers, misanthropes and altruists - 3500 professionals in the field of performing arts annually.

During the reign of Vilar, the festival was national, but after 1971 a course of internalization was outlined, and artists from all over the world flocked to medieval Avignon. As a result, the festival brings the city a profit of up to 25 million euros per year.

3. CARNIVAL CULTURE

In addition to the highly artistic, rigorously selected and approved by experts official program, Avignon also has the so-called OFF program: dozens of theater companies arrange tours at their own expense, hoping for proceeds from ticket sales, acquiring the status of "participant of the Avignon Festival" and public recognition. Here, no one guarantees the quality, and the audience chooses performances at their own peril and risk - succumbing to the persuasion of barkers or their own curiosity. But it is precisely thanks to the presence of a huge number of motley, unknown, arrogant and annoying, reckless and talented artists of the unofficial program that Avignon transforms for three weeks of the festival, like Venice during the carnival, and becomes so attractive for tourists. It is impossible to see the walls of houses because of posters pasted on top of each other, mummers, puppeteers and mimes roam the streets, "musical carts" roam the boulevards - there is no such atmosphere anywhere else, and the amazed audience also becomes part of this theatrical masquerade.

The Avignon Festival has always emphasized its democracy and independence - it has no sponsors, no ratings, no prizes. And even the art director Olivier Pi himself rides around the city in a white shirt on a bicycle - charming, simple and accessible to everyone.

4. OUTDOOR

“The reunion of architecture with drama” Jean Vilar understood literally, and he suggested that the performances be played in the huge courtyard of the Papal Palace, which still remains the main stage of the Avignon Festival. The Roman Catholic Church settled in the south of France at the beginning of the 14th century, and seven legitimate pontiffs ruled here - the so-called Avignon captivity of the popes from 1309 to 1378. All this time, the Papal Palace was being completed, and now it is the largest Gothic building in Europe. Many of the performances that were shown within these walls are unimaginable without them.

In total, the Avignon Festival has about 20 different venues: this is the courtyard of the Carmelite Monastery; and the Boulbon quarry - an abandoned quarry in the mountains, 15 kilometers from the city, where Peter Brook first showed his eight-hour Mahabharata, which ended with a real sunrise; and the Convent of St. Louis, where the headquarters of the festival is located, and the House of Jean Vilar, and the Church of the Celestines, which became a natural backdrop for the painting "Paradise" from Romeo Castellucci's "Divine Comedy". The photo of the flooded temple, in the middle of which there is a burnt piano, has spread all over the theatrical publications of the world. And about 15 years ago, Henrietta Yanovskaya showed The Thunderstorm here, and the aspiration upward, to God of the religious Katerina, who regrets that people do not fly like birds, became understandable, and the performance acquired a different dimension and scale.

5. riots

The history of the festival is by no means cloudless - several times in its history it was in jeopardy. In the rebellious year 1968, rebellious youth from all over France gathered in Avignon. Students expelled the great mime Jean-Louis Barrot from the theater, nearly gave Jean Vilar a heart attack with unfounded accusations, and disrupted Maurice Béjart's performance by pouring it onto the stage right during the performance. At the same time, the festival program included the rebels Godard and Truffaut, as well as performances by the cult American Living Theatre.

The second big scandal came in 2003, when French theater workers rebelled against the government's wage reform. Festival director Bernard Favre d'Arcier supported the strikers and personally tried to resolve the conflict with the Ministry of Culture. The state did not make concessions, the show was canceled, and the director lost his post. During a press conference, Bernard Favre d'Arcier's voice trembled and his listeners cried . And Avignon again suffered losses in 2014, when a new bill confirmed the terms of the 2003 labor agreements. A wave of protests swept through France: in La Rochelle, Arles, Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, Montpellier. However, Olivier Pi, who just then took over the reins of the review, although he sacrificed six performances of the first week, refused to cancel it entirely.

6 DOWN SYNDROME DANCERS AND THE MASTURBATION CHAMPIONSHIP

The audience of the Avignon Festival is hardy, educated and not too aggressive: no one writes denunciations to the Ministry of Culture and does not put pig heads at the gates of the theater. Shouts of "boo" and demonstrative departures are a fairly civilized expression of discontent. And they often provoke the audience: then Thomas Ostermeier makes his puffy Hamlet with a beer belly exude curses and eat the earth; then Olivier Pi will bring on stage a stinking motorbike, Cordelia in a tutu, her mouth covered with black tape, naked Lear and Gloucester, whose eyes have been gouged out with a tablespoon; then Angelica Liddell will show women cutting their knees with a blade; then Jerome Belle will stage a ballet on people with Down syndrome, causing the audience to have an uncomfortable conversation, then Alain Platel will arrange a transvestite cabaret with elderly men in ladies' outfits, exploring the features of sexual identity, then Jan Fabre in "Orgy of Tolerance" will test the audience for strength with the help of physiologically credible and depressingly long masturbation championship. The directors of the Avignon Festival are not shy about raising difficult topics, studying phobias and perversions under a magnifying glass, and turning European values ​​inside out.

7. MAIN NAMES

According to the headliners of the Avignon Festival, one can study the history of European and world theater. In the 1960s, there were performances by Jean Vilar, in which Gerard Philippe and Maria Cazares shone, and progressive opuses by young directors created under the influence of the French new wave. In 1967, Maurice Béjart, who turned our idea of ​​classical ballet upside down, showed Mass for the Present Days in Avignon. In the mid-1970s, the American Robert Wilson came to the fore with his ability to masterfully shuffle different styles and genres and stunning visual imagery (“Einstein on the Seashore”). In 1980, John Neumeier stirred up the public with the "blasphemous" ballet "St. Matthew Passion" to the music of Bach, in which he himself appeared on the stage - and only an impeccable philological education, including from the priests of the Jesuit order, saved him. Pina Bausch brought her incomprehensible, absurd, revolutionary "Carnations" to Avignon, which became a shock to the public. In 1988, Luke Bondi staged his beloved Shakespeare here, in the 2000s Peter Brook discovered the possibilities of the Boulbon quarry, and Thomas Ostermeier turned the site of the majestic Papal Palace into a backyard of a metropolis littered with garbage (“Woyzeck”), in 2010 Christoph Marthaler evoked religious ecstasy with the help of ordinary welding in "Papperlapapp" - the saga of the Avignon "capture of the popes", based on real events.

8. RUSSIAN THEME

Performances based on Russian classics - from Dostoevsky to Bulgakov - constantly appear on the poster of the Avignon Festival, but Russian directors are not favored in the south of France. "Russian Seasons" happened in Avignon only once: in 1997, Pyotr Fomenko, Anatoly Vasilyev, Sergey Zhenovach, Evgeny Kamenkovich, Valery Fokin, Kama Ginkas, Ivan Popovsky and Rezo Gabriadze were invited there to form their own idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe modern Russian theater. Only Anatoly Vasiliev "got accustomed" to the festival as a permanent guest. In 2006, when, due to disagreements with Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, he was asked to vacate the post of artistic director of the School of Dramatic Art, Vasilyev brought Canto 23rd to Avignon. Burial of Patroclus. Games "and" Mozart and Salieri ", and never returned to Russia. All the more interesting now is the fact that after almost a decade of absence of Russians in Avignon, Kirill Serebrennikov has been going there for the second year in a row. In 2015, his “Idiots” based on the script of the film of the same name by Lars von Trier, the action of which was transferred to modern Moscow, were shown with great success at the review. And for the current, anniversary, 70th festival, the creator of the Gogol Center is taking Gogol's Dead Souls, where Chichikov is played by the American Odin Byron and the Jew Semyon Steinberg. If one time can still be regarded as an accident, then two times is already a trend, and this means that Serebrennikov is "in the cage", and is recognized as one of the leaders of the European theatrical avant-garde.

9. FASHION FOR RESPECTABILITY

There was also a creative crisis in the history of the Avignon Festival, not related to the events of Red May or wars for the opportunity to live on welfare for 11 months a year. After the resignation of Bernard Faivre d "Arcier, Hortense Archambault and Vincent Baudrillet became directors, heading for a non-verbal and rigidly social theater. The poster has more modern dance (Josef Naj, Jan Fabre), which you can’t even call dance: provocations, plastic studies on the subject of violence, aggression, the apocalyptic state of the world. Critics talked about how experiments with movement as such and electronic visuality are replacing the theater of words and big ideas. The audience craved depth and metaphysics, and they were offered gloomy performances with naked bodies rolling on the floor. Directors , sensitively responding to discontent, began to invite new artistic directors every year to form the program of the festival.First it was the No. 1 German theatrical newsmaker Thomas Ostermeier, then the "grand style" actress, Comédie-Française prima Valerie Dreville and director Romeo Castellucci, post-avant-garde in spirit , but not alienated by sensuality, emotionality and bewitching beauty.The current director Ol Ivie Pi forms the poster on his own, but also prefers classical training and meaningful work with the word to radical plastic experiments. With his arrival, there were more stars on the playbill (Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant, Hanna Shigula), and now respectability is pushing contemporary art out of the stage.

10. AVIGNON FESTIVAL - 70!

This year, the most prestigious theater festival in the world is celebrating its 70th anniversary. At the end of March, Olivier Pi made a policy statement (“How to live when politics continually proves its treachery?”, “When revolution is impossible, the theater remains”) and presented the main performances of the review, which will be held in Avignon from July 6 to 24. Among the main themes are politics, the rise of nationalism, the Middle East and women artists. The festival will open with a stage version of the epoch-making Visconti's Death of the Gods, interpreted by the Belgian director Ivo van Hove. Also on the program are a series about the history of the Avignon Festival from the Italian wandering troupe La Piccola Familia, a 12-hour marathon "2666" by Julien Gosselin, famous for his production of "Elementary Particles" by Michel Houellebecq, "The Karamazovs" by Jean Bellorini, "The Raft of the Medusa" by Thomas Jolly, “Chronicles of the Assassination of Rabin” by Amos Gitai with “Fasbinder’s muse” Hanna Shigula and the famous Palestinian actress, “Heroes’ Square”, for which Christian Lupa - the national hero of Poland - has already received all possible prizes, a new performance by Angelica Liddell and a ballet by Sidi Laby Sherkaoui " Bible 7.16" and much more. Olivier Pi himself is working on Aeschylus' tragedy Prometheus Bound. In total, the official program includes 26 dramatic performances, 7 dance performances and 14 interdisciplinary ones. French and foreigners - equally. And the symbol of the festival will be the Turin horse (the one over whose suffering, according to legend, Nietzsche wept before falling into madness), depicted on the poster by the artist Adel Abdessemed, which either kicks off offenders, or overcomes an obstacle with one jump.