AVIGNON mon amour

Diverse and clever, this arts festival is as charming as its southern French setting.

Tourists wander through Avignon in the south of France to see the 14th-century Popes' Palace, the picturesque Pont d'Avignon of song and scenery that inspired great painters. Every July, though, hundreds of thousands of theatre-goers from across Europe are there for Le Festival d'Avignon.

The 2011 edition, its 65th, offered more than 40 shows, totalling 300 performances, at venues in and outside the town. Many were French or even world premieres.

The ticket prices were lower than would be for a similar event in America and Asia thanks largely to a 60-per-cent subsidy shared by the municipality, region and country. And there were discounts for students, the unemployed and theatre professionals.

Perhaps there's a lesson in this for our Culture Ministry: Festivals—national or international—can't carry on at high quality without significant government support.

People queued for a chance to buy any tickets returned by earlier purchasers. This was a familiar sight.

Apart from conventional indoor, air-conditioned theatres, the organisers took advantage of the summer weather to transform outdoor courtyards and sports facilities for performances, with the directors adjusting accordingly and skilfully.

Each July, Avignon is the place to be for dance and theatre professionals, some of whom also attend meetings and arrange future bookings of their own. I was informed by French cultural attaché Stéphane Négrin that French politicians shoulder into the crowd too, knowing that voters care about their cultural as well as their economic policies.

The festival features exhibitions with content relevant to the shows, and a bookstore stocked with materials by and about the performers.

Every day there are lectures and discussions, and anyone, not just the press, could attend press conferences and meet the artists.

You rarely find these supportive elements at festivals in Asia.

I'll never forget the sight of hundreds of people streaming towards the courtyard of the Popes' Palace at 4am one day to see "Cesena".

This concert of 14th-century polyphonic music, set to contemporary dance by Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker, began in darkness and made clever use of the sunrise. The 2,000-seat temporary theatre was packed.

There were new French plays—Pascal Rambert's "Clôture de l'amour", Cyril Teste's "Sun", Sophie Perez and Xavier Boussiron's "Oncle Gourdin" and Arthur Nauzyciel's adaptation of Yannick Haenel's novel "Jan Karski".

There were new translations and adaptations of foreign works, like the classic Swedish drama "Mademoiselle Julie", with Juliette Binoche as a star magnet; the Spanish political drama "L'Ent Tement"; and the Russian comedy "Le Suicide".

There were artistic "adventures" everywhere. Many shows combined dance, drama, music and video. Even the seemingly straightforward-realistic plays like "Clôture de l'Amour", "Mademoiselle Julie" and "Je suis le vent" made striking use of the scene settings.

With 90 per cent of the audience being French, it's of course understandable (as well as educational for foreigners) that most of the plays were performed in French, without translations.

English synopses were provided for some shows, though, and there were works by American choreographers William Forsythe and Meg Stuart and the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma. "Je suis le vent", a new piece by French director Patrice Chéreau, was actually presented in English with French surtitles.

This primarily theatrical festival has begun offering contemporary dance, a nod to the global trend in erasing the line between dance and drama. Oddly, many festivals, especially in Asia, are still adamant about keeping them separate.

The dancing at Avignon this year was probably due in part to the 2011 associate artistic director (there's a fresh face in the job every year). Boris Charmatz is a rising star in contemporary dance.

He also staged two very different works—"Enfant" at the Popes' Palace and "Levée des conflits" on a football pitch across the river.

In other words, the festival managed to honour tradition as well as look forward into the future at the same time.

For more than three decades Le Festival d'Avignon has been accompanied by a fringe festival called Le Off. Smaller in scale and with a wider variety of performances, it opens each day as early as 9am and continues past midnight.

The main Avignon event is colloquially called, as a result, "the In festival". By letting in the fresh air of fringe, it became a more cool, more fun place to be. In my bag I carried guide maps to both In and Off.

Interestingly, it didn't feel like two festivals competing, but in fact complementing one another beautifully.

Le Off may not be as large as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, but it gets people of more nationalities participating.

Avignon isn't a big city, so there's little else happening there in July apart from the dual festivals, but the artists of Off—younger and less well-known than those of In—keep the streets bustling all day. Passers-by gawk at their short skits and snag a brochure promoting their shows.

In his new book French Theatre Today, MIT professor Edward Baron Turk notes that, in 2009, the average visitor to Avignon stayed for eight days and saw 11 shows at Off and two at In.

I managed 20 In and six Off in nine days, thanks to efficient press services, plus a Velopop bicycle (rented from the city for a week for only 5 euros) and my two legs (free of charge).

I got from one show to the next in less than 10 minutes on average—and that’s impossible in Bangkok.

The writer's trip was fully supported by the French Embassy. He thanks in particular cultural attaché Stéphane Négrin, an Avignon native.

Visit www.Festival-Avignon.com and www.AvignonLeOff.com.

written by Pawit Mahasarinand

published in THE NATION on Saturday 30th July, 2011

photos courtesy of Festival d'Avignon