Wesley Doucette - Page 2

A two-person epistolary drama between a father and daughter - On the surface, this sounds like the kind of conventional, writer-driven theatre that the Festival d’Avignon seeks to disrupt. Yet, coming from the mind of Tiago Rodrigues, La Distance becomes a conduit for deeper reflections on memory, family, and the social questions that linger in their wake.

I should perhaps begin with a confession: I don’t know the work of Jacques Brel. In continental Europe, this borders on impossibility, akin to not knowing Elvis in America.

Since its founding in 1947, only a handful of performances at the Festival d’Avignon have achieved mythic status. These productions offer their audiences bragging rights for life as  “you had to be there” events.

Les Amazones d’Avignon, a local feminist collective, distributed flyers to audience members entering the Cloître des Carmes for Milo Rau’s Le Procès Pelicot. Their protest was not just against their exclusion from the project, but also against the broader marginalization of militant feminists from public discourse.

From 2023 to 2026, Festival d’Avignon artistic director Tiago Rodrigues has invited director Gwenaël Morin to stage an annual production under the banner Démonter Les Remparts Pour Finir Le Pont / Dismantle the Walls to Finish the Bridge.

Tragedy doesn’t hinge on a twist but on a reversal or, as the Greeks termed it, a peripeteia. At the start of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, the characters have already endured a series of such reversals. The play is structured less as a tragedy than as its postmortem. What happens after the cataclysm?

Duri Bischoff’s set for Christoph Marthaler’s Le Sommet, now playing at the Festival d’Avignon’s FabricA theatre, presents a photorealistic cross-section of a chalet. Illuminated by cool fluorescent light, the interior is constructed from natural, practical materials. Rising incongruously from the center of the chalet is a large stone wave. Upstage center, a dumbwaiter dings.

The impulse with Avignon’s Cour d’Honneur is to go big. Since the Festival’s inception in 1947, artists have attempted to match the scale of the 30-meter wall behind them. It’s a gamble, but when it works, it’s mesmerizing. For her concert reEncanto, singer Mayra Andrade instead tamed the Cour d’Honneur into an intimate space.

Mette Ingvartsen’s Delirious Night, now in performance at the Festival d’Avignon’s Cour du Lycée St. Joseph, tries historical moments of frenzy, like medieval carnivals, on for size. The cast enters in mostly casual attire and masks. A performer then begins to clap a rhythm. This rhythm is gradually taken up by the other dancers, who fill the center of the cour with a run and kick.

Choreographers Selma and Sofiane Ouissi appear only on screen in Laaroussa Quartet, now in performance at the Festival d’Avignon’s La Fabrica. Seated outdoors in Tunisia, the camera lingers on their gestures, offering only fleeting glimpses of their faces as they occasionally enter the frame.

This past week, I found myself explaining the concept of “commit to the bit” to a friend in Paris. “But what is the bit?” he asked. If only he had seen Marlene Monteiro Freitas’s Nôt, currently in performance at the Festival d’Avignon’s Cour d’Honneur, he would have encountered an extraordinary case study.

The news can inform us. It can also transform pain into ambient noise. This is particularly true in Lebanon, which has endured revolution, a catastrophic explosion in Beirut, and bombardments from Israel.

This past spring L’Espace la Risée cabaret at the Rue Bélanger in Montreal welcomed a full-length drama, Deniz Başar’s Wine and Halva. The play employs a nearly improvisational dynamism as it explores the limitations of Western liberalism. In the play two young artist-academics dissect these questions. Their discourse intensifies as they navigate theoretical disagreements alongside their contrasting lived experience. This somewhat polemic discourse is buoyed by a coming-of-age friendship. The ingenuity of the staging in this intimate cabaret space highlights the creative collaboration of both performance and debate.

The 76th Festival d'Avignon officially concluded last night with Kae Tempest's The Line is a Curve at the Cour d'Honneur. This is the fifth album by Tempest. Previous works include Brand New Ancients, which I had the benefit of seeing some years back at New York's St. Ann's Warehouse. Their work in that instance was a transporting piece of storytelling. It was a very sober affair. The Line is a Curve started that way, but quickly became the cathartic rock concert to end the annual Festival.

Silent Legacy, now in performance at the Festival d'Avignon's Cloître des Cèlestins, asks questions about points of exchange. The relationship between the dancer and choreographer is complex. Literarily focused theatre's collaborative quality sometimes benefits from the boundaries made by script writing. In this way, the playwright has a product outside the performance. In most instances with dance, the work can only exist within the body of the performer. Silent Legacy presents its audience with two such points of exchange.

The text of Una Imagen Interior, a production by Spanish company El Conde De Torrefiel now in performance at Vedène's Autre Scène du Grand Avignon, is relegated to a bilingual surtitle board. Who does your mind cast in this role of narrator? A whimsical and childlike Björk might be appropriate. A resonant and poetic Maya Angelou might also work. My mind landed on the professorial tenor of David Attenborough. He was a good companion in a work that aspires to transcend 'frames.'

People often describe the imagination of a child as one of wonder or sweet innocence. The truth is, kids are weird and intense. They treat the oddest aesthetics with tragedian severity. François Chaignaud and Geoffroy Jourdain have captured such joyful oddity in TUMULUS, now performing in Avignon's La Fabrica. What results is a Seussian Gesamtkunstwerk.

Most times in Avignon, when a work is called something ominous like Blood, Bones, or, as is the case for Sophie Linsmaux and Aurelio Mergola's new work, Flesh, the worst is to be expected. The experience might be transformative, but it'll be a taxing journey. Happily, the two artists tackle questions of our relationships to our bodies with dark humor. Set in four vignettes at Avignon's Gymnase du Lycée Mistral, Flesh is Avignon's answer to Charlie Chaplin.

Choreographer Dada Masilo, a South African native, studied dance at Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's school in Brussels. While there she developed an appreciation for the grand patrimonial dance-works. Her company, Dance Factory Johannesburg, has made a name for itself through oftentimes-comedic deconstructions of European classics like Swan Lake, and Giselle. In Le Sacrifice Masilo has decided to address a different dance classic, Le Sacre du Printemps. It was a long road to the Festival for Le Sacrifice, now performing in Avignon's Cour du Lycée Saint-Joseph. The piece has been twice canceled due to Covid. While her movement vocabulary lacks in imagination, the performances themselves were thrilling.

One of the most famous images of 20th century theatre is that of Brecht's Mother Courage who, when told she needs to remain incognito when her son is shot, offers a silent scream. In Ali Chahrour's Du Temps Où Ma Mère Racontait, now in performance at Avignon Université's Cour Minérale, Laïla Chahrour similarly unhinges her jaw into a scream, though it's anything but silent. Undergirded by musicians playing behind her, she cries into the audience, her voice rising into the starry sky. In the face of all the tragedy she has explored with her family, it is a resonating moment of catharsis.