What is so attractive about the Avignon Festival is that it has at its heart a traditional French summer street festival, a jour de fete, but a very glamorous one, taken to extremes; the kind of fair that adults dream about and children innocently expect. There are two main squares in which this takes place, the crowded Place de l'Horloge and the spacious Place du Palais. The latter provides a large, cobbled stage for anyone who wants to dance, act, or hold an impromptu party.
Church Militant
In contrast, the Place du Palais is very grand, dominated by the most striking architectural example of the church militant in Europe--the gray castle walls of the Palais des Papes. In the fourteenth century, Avignon was the home of the breakaway papacy, led by the French bishops, who objected to the domination of Rome. A dozen street theater companies can play in this square simultaneously, filling the night air with the sound of their drums.
The festival begins in the evening and goes on to the early, and not so early, hours of the morning. The main theater performances start at ten in the evening.
This year, in one of the smaller antechambers, there was a meeting of talented young directors selected from eighteen European countries, the radical avant garde plotting to get rid of the old brigade and swapping revolutionary videos. This furtive conspiracy was sponsored by UNESCO and the festival authorities and organized by the International Association of Theatre Critics, thereby providing my excuse, other than pleasure, for returning to Avignon as one of its several middle-aged targets.
Their politics were green, in at least two senses. "What does it matter if you're a communist or a capitalist," one wondered, "if you're still poisoning the planet with industrialization."
One of their guests was a 45-year-old French director from Nanterre, Jean-Pierre Vincent, who expressed his opinion that theater should be secular in its inspiration or at least try to avoid the dogmatism of the church.
This started heated discussions about the importance of religion to art. The young directors seemed to be in favor of religion, not Christianity, Islam, or any other formal faith, but rather a quasimystical reunion with the forces of nature. They didn't mind sounding vague. They just knew that modern theater lacked a certain spiritual dimension, and they wanted to discover what it was and how it had been lost.
Superb Settings
Avignon excels in having places that may not be theaters exactly but that provide superbly appropriate settings for the kind of spectacles that French directors love to present. The internal courtyard of the Palais des Papes is one example; but in recent years, an even more majestic stage has been discovered in an old stone quarry some fifteen miles from Avignon, the Carriere Callet a Boulbon.
This was where, in 1985, Peter Brook premiered The Mahanbharata, an unforgettable occasion that lingers in the mind perhaps too long and too vividly,
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