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Who and where? Each July a small medieval-walled city in Provence hosts one of the grandest theatre jamborees on the planet. For three and a half weeks, from 10 A.m. to well after midnight, its winding streets and picturesque public squares swarm with festivalgoers of all ages and of numerous nationalities. Avignon’s year-round population is about 96,000—and most of its citizens live beyond the ramparts that enfold the city center. At festival season, many times that number come to visit and perform, injecting nearly 2.75 million euros into the local economy.1 Wealthy visitors may choose to stay at the chic Hôtel La Mirande in the shadow of the Popes’ Palace, a towering Gothic fortress where the absentee Bishops of Rome resided in the fourteenth century; or at the Hôtel d’Europe, a converted Renaissance townhouse a stone’s throw from the Rhône River; or perhaps at the Hôtel Cloître Saint-Louis, part of a sixteenth-century complex that serves as headquarters for the Avignon Festival.The most budget-conscious pitch tents at camps on Barthelasse Island, across from Avignon Bridge—the tourist site famous for its missing arches and for the children’s ditty about those who dance on it “tout en rond” (“round in a circle”). Moderate-priced hotel rooms and apartments are plentiful within the city ramparts but are best reserved at least six months in advance. Jean Vilar (1912–1971) launched this bustling festival as part of a modest Semaine d’art en Avignon (Arts Week in Avignon) in late summer 1947—three years after the liberation of Paris from Nazi rule and one year after the first Cannes Film Festival. The impetus came from two art dealers, Christian and Yvonne Zervos, who had the unprecedented idea of exhibiting modern paintings and sculpture in 9 Ethnicities . . . . . 11 A Festival Turns Sixty . . . . . . . . .. A V I G N O N 260 the Grand Chapel of the Popes’ Palace that September.The poet René Char (1907–1988), a friend of the Zervoses, suggested that they ask Vilar if he might augment the festivities by bringing to Avignon his recent French-language production of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935), which had had a notable Paris run at the Théâtre du VieuxColombier in 1945. Vilar declined to revive Murder in the Cathedral. Instead he proposed to direct, act in, or coordinate three new productions in three distinct venues: the palace’s open-air Honor Court, its Pope Urban V Gardens, and Avignon’s Municipal Theatre. Vilar’s choice of works was a harbinger of the kind of programming that would come to define the early years of the Avignon Festival: William Shakespeare’s Richard II, a grand English classic never before performed in France; Paul Claudel’s L’histoire de Tobie et de Sara (The Story of Tobie and Sara, 1939), a little-known play by a great living author ; and La terrasse de midi (The Noon Terrace), an unpublished politically themed piece by the young writer Maurice Clavel (1920–1979). The Arts Week in Avignon soon evolved into the summer residency of the Paris-based Théâtre national populaire (TNP), which Vilar headed as of 1951.The TNP’s mission was to build a more democratic audience for theatre. Vilar hoped that the yearly festival in Provence would likewise appeal to a wide spectrum of French men and women regardless of their social class and that it would especially benefit those who had previously been deprived of the pleasures of theatregoing. In accord with this founding vision were Georges Pons, Avignon’s Communist mayor at the time of the first Arts Week, and Jeanne Laurent (1902–1989), a senior state official in the short-lived Ministry of Youth, Arts, and Letters and then a guiding force in the Fourth Republic’s project of décentralisation théâtrale, which aimed to have permanent regional theatres function as a counterbalance to Paris’s abiding supremacy in the field. Certain left-wing thinkers—including Jean-Paul Sartre (1905– 1980)—deemed Avignon and the TNP to be failures because they did not attract many factory or farm workers.Vilar, however, was proud of what he thought of as the distinctly popular quality of his audiences: Avignon festivalgoers tended to be unpretentious, uninhibited, and open-minded, and they were alert to and comfortable with their diversity of social standing and educational background.To make the relatively less sophisticated...

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