The Cour d’Honneur at the Palais des Papes plays center stage.
A few nights before the French took their final vote in this summer’s snap parliamentary election, Tiago Rodrigues, the director of the Festival d’Avignon, staged an all-night, adhoc rally against the far right in the Cour d’Honneur. This dramatic courtyard in the center of the Palais des Papes has been the festival’s marquee venue since its start, in 1947; audiences enter a steep stone box, open to the sky, with a massive performance area backed by one looming wall of the papal palace. Rodrigues, a Portuguese director, took the reins at the festival two years ago, and his “vision of the stage,” he has said, is a mixture of “the poetical, the political, and the personal.” This year, as the election approached, he declared that, if the nationalists took power, Avignon would become a “festival of resistance.”
The same day I landed in France, on July 7th, that particular electoral storm turned. And yet, despite the lulling heat of a Provençal summer, a sense of barely concealed combat still permeated the festival. (For one thing, you could spot, among the thousands of theatre bills and bulletins pinned around town, a few torn Marine Le Pen posters.) Avignon’s beauty has a tranquillizing effect: the old city’s medieval ramparts kept the (literal) traffic of the modern world at bay, and my gaze often floated up above the crowds to the linen-pale limestone buildings, drowsy behind wooden shutters. But even ten-foot-thick walls couldn’t block out the sound of a continuing, existential parry and thrust. In many productions, you could still hear the clash of right against left, artists against critics, brutal institutions against the vulnerable people they supposedly protect.
Denne historien er fra August 05, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra August 05, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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AFFINITY COMEDY
The state of the Netflix standup special.
DUTY DANCING
How Seamus Heaney wrote his way through a war.
DESPERATELY SEEKING
The supreme contradictions of Simone Weil.
WILD THING
MJ Lenderman resists the smoothing, neutering effects of technology.
LUCK OF THE DRAW
Nate Silver argues that poker can help us game our uncertain world.
GREEN SLEEVES
“What I want to know,” the woman said to the therapist, “is why the voices always say mean, terrible things.
DRUG OF CHOICE
AI. is transforming the way medicines are made.
EVERY OBITUARY'S FIRST PARAGRAPH
Alfred T. Alfred, whose invention of the plastic fastener that affixes tags to clothing upended the tag industry and made him one of America’s youngest multimillionaires—until he lost his plastic fastener fortune in a 1993 game of badminton, as depicted in the Lifetime original movie “Bad Minton”— died on Saturday. He was eighty-one.
BE HER GUEST
The plush ambience of Ina Garten's good fortune.
SPREADING THE WEALTH
Why a young heiress asked fifty strangers to redistribute her fortune.