The Avignon Vision

On July 14th at 11:00 p.m., after the annual fireworks display along the Rhone, the large public square in front of the Popes’ Palace was transformed into a sound and light tribute to Jean Vilar, celebrated actor, theatre director of the Théâtre Nationale Populaire and founder and director of the Avignon Performing Arts Festival from 1947 to 1971. Thanks to KompleXKapharnouM, an arts collective from Villeurbanne commissioned by the festival to celebrate Vilar’s “birthday” (2012 marks the hundredth anniversary of Vilar’s birth), the façade of the Popes’ Palace and the back wall of the Banque de France became the backdrop screens for projections of “Place Public,” as the spectacle was called. Over eight thousand spectators caught glimpses of Vilar’s career and major contributions to French theatre history as they made their way from the Rhone to the Place de la République, surrounded by archival images of scenes from Vilar’s memorable productions, cartoon figures, interviews with his actors and staff, and other testimonials. The festival directors hoped that this would leave viewers with some sense of Vilar’s legacy, of his ideal to reach an audience of people from all walks of life, and his conviction that art and culture should be available to everyone, regardless of financial means or social standing.

Now that France has a new Socialist president, François Hollande, there is talk of returning to these ideals, some voicing of hope that culture will once more become a government priority. Of course this is not 1981 when the newly elected Socialist president François Mitterand doubled the cultural budget and appointed Jack Lang Minister of Culture to carry out their adventurous cultural projects. These are lean years, and Hollande’s government’s arts policy has yet to be defined in terms of concrete action. It is too soon to know what plans Aurélie Filippetti, Hollande’s Cultural and Communications Minister, has in mind and whether or not she will have the funds to carry them out. An emphasis on developing school programs for the arts is promising, and the fact that funding has at least not been diminished, seems the best outcome for the time being.

Hollande visited Avignon on July 15th, the first French president to do so since Mitterand, and he openly spoke of his commitment to the ideal of forging a new democratic culture, taking into account the cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity of contemporary France. This was good news but will funds be available to carry out this ideal? In any case, this year’s festival program demonstrated a commitment to diversity and difference. Out of this year’s fifty shows, twenty-eight were premieres, six were performed in France for the first time, and sixteen were in foreign languages with French supertitles. Companies invited represented many different generations and countries; Simon McBurney, John Berger, from England, William Kentridge, and Steven Cohen from South Africa, Thomas Ostermeier and Christoph Marthaler from Germany, Romeo Castellucci from Italy, Romeu Runa and Miguel Moreira from Portugal, and a number of contemporary French artists as well, to mention just a few. From Simon McBurney’s Master and Margaritawhich flooded the walls of the Honor Court with its full scale use of technological wonders to Eric Vigner’s production of La Faculté, a production that used no visuals whatsoever, many of the festival’s offerings challenged the boundaries and definition of theater, questioning the possibility of any traditional sense of theatre within our mediated society.

In the spirit of Vilar’s project to attract a large broad-based audience to new forms of artistic endeavor, this year’s festival, the sixty-sixth edition, started off with a major “popular” success, Simon McBurney’s stunning adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margaritaplayed to perfection by the members of his Complicité company for eight sold-out performances. Ticket prices (25 to 40 Euros or 31 to 51 dollars with 16 Euros ($20) for students and other young people) were not in keeping with Vilar’s bottom line for his...