Avignon en cirque: How the Avignon Festival Shows Off the “Ins” of Circus
It’s no wonder why the Avignon Festival has become one of the circus world’s premier annual events. Each summer, companies from France and beyond bring their best and brightest offerings to Avignon, France, and stage their work for audiences. In his review, Pascal Jacob walks us through the Festival in its entirety, from its history and pedigree to some of the most thought-provoking shows from this year’s program.
Set in both the heart and margins of the ancient City of the Popes, the Festival d’Avignon is one of the world’s largest theatre festivals, held every summer since 1947. Articulated in two separate entities, the “IN” and the “OFF” festivals, it offers for about three weeks the possibility of attending more than 1,500 shows. For several years, the Festival has also been hosting a few dozen contemporary circus companies, sheltered from within the walls of the city or on the other side of its ramparts.
Half of these troupes are divided between Piot Island and Barthelasse Island, where they can benefit from the existing structures or build their own chapiteau. The other half, which do not have a big top or prefer a frontal ratio, invest in one of the many halls installed in the city. This proliferation of scenic venues, equipped for a few weeks each year, is, without doubt, the most amazing characteristic of the Avignon Festival. During the three weeks, classes, garages, warehouses, prisons, schools, gardens, and chapels are all spaces of play conquered by thousands of actors, dancers, singers, and acrobats. Their shows flow from hour to hour, with changes of scenery made in a few minutes and a constantly renewed audience. Places with several rooms, such as the Théâtre des Lucioles, La Scala Provence, and L’Entrepôt, can present about ten or twenty different shows. It is under the responsibility of the invited companies to manage their own communication, whether through posters glued or stapled throughout the city, parades on the streets, or leaflets placed on the tables of cafés and restaurants, accompanied by a quick presentation of the show or even a very short demonstration with costumes and music!
If the “IN” festival, the most prestigious arm of the Festival d’Avignon, offers “only” forty shows, presented, for instance, under the stars in the Cour d’Honneur of the Palace of the Popes, or in the hollow of the Carrière Boulbon; in the shelter of the Chapelle des Pénitents Blancs, on the large stage of the Municipal Opera, or in the heart of the Cloître des Carmes; then the “OFF” festival flourishes absolutely everywhere. It is perhaps this total freedom that has fostered the establishment of circus arts in Avignon for more than twenty years. Piloted by Piot Island-based La Grainerie de Toulouse, one of the National Poles dedicated to the diffusion of contemporary circus companies on the territory, the operation Occitanie fait son cirque en Avignon offers formidable visibility each year to a dozen troupes, often regional ones linked to the Centre des arts du cirque du Lido in Toulouse. Recently, however, La Grainerie has also been developing a close partnership with the Théâtre des Doms, supported in Avignon by the Belgian region Wallonia-Brussels. The Occitanie site on Piot Island is equipped with an air-conditioned gymnasium, transformed for the occasion into a frontal scenic space, and there are usually two or three chapiteaux installed on a vast lot where other tents are also erected for catering and conviviality. Artists who wish to do so can also set up their caravans or camping tents in the back of the field. Several hundred spectators bring the site to life daily by coming to drink a coffee before attending the first performances from 10 am, while the camp barely wakes up. It is really there, from morning to night, that we find the most innovative artistic proposals in today’s circus. It is a real barometer of the axes and trends that irrigate the circus arts and the 2022 edition has not failed to maintain these habits.
The shows presented at this year’s Festival are resolutely political and reflect above all, more than ever, this opportunity to free oneself from the obligation to “do” circus, to “be” circus. The technical dimension is no longer a presupposition; the narrative does not come as a complement to an acrobatic performance, but is instead imposed as a dimension in its own right that can be nurtured—or not—by the execution of a simple figure or the integration of a more accomplished sequence.
The show Les petits bonnets, presented under the tent of Cirque du Docteur Paradi, a company founded in 1985, is an acid test on the condition of women in the textile industry from the 19th century to the present day. Created in the spirit of a satirical cabaret, the show is both committed, theatrical, musical, and circassien, even if the only real acrobatic performance consists of a sequence of wire walking, very mastered, completed by the insertion of some very brief technical fragments. Yet the big top, the track, the bleachers, and the red curtain say circus as much as, if not more than, in a traditional circus. And the power of the show comes from this 360° perspective, from this area chosen to express a cry of anger without shadow, from fragments of a circassien language used as fugitive supports to the blossoming of a powerful dramaturgy.
A circus parable on Resistance, Overpower, and Impotence, Inops, a show created by the company La Main de l’Homme, questions our relationship to the fragility of the world with a humor tinged with despair. The show deploys a strong and physical game where acrobatics is still at the service of a political discourse and is docked against a strange universe split by a wall of 4,000 translucent cups that ends up collapsing like the fragile house of cards of our illusions.
With A Snack to Be, the company La Main s’affaire offers a distortion of reality at the pace of a road movie. Very well-drawn characters meet one evening in a gas station in the middle of nowhere. The hyperrealism of the setting is quickly contradicted by the intense and poetic madness that runs through each of the sequences of the show, which are interwoven with natural confounding acrobatic figures. Humour is very present throughout the performance and helps to weave the thread of the narrative, equally with a form of fantastic realism that adorns the show with an unprecedented density. Like Inops and Les petits bonnets, A Snack to Be relies on the play of its actors to erase even more the boundaries between the arts. These creations help us to think of the world as an incessant journey from elsewhere to here and from here to elsewhere; as a world where imagination is action, and where action is truly the sister of dream.
Sheltered from the ramparts, the Australians of Circa and the Québécois of Machine de Cirque have invested in two theatres, Les Lucioles and La Scala Provence, to present three shows, What we have been, La Galerie and Machine de Cirque— strong creations, sometimes funny, which illustrate the very wide prism of forms that structure and shape the contemporary circus. It stands as the opposite of such an artistic proposal as that of Belgian company Collectif Rafale’s Sanctuaire sauvage, a show that favors circles to create a strange sensory atmosphere nourished by powerful images.
This edition of the Festival d’Avignon could be deciphered as a fascinating echo chamber through which to better discern the lines of force that determine, in the chamber’s hollow, the flat surfaces, hinges, and roughnesses of today’s circus. Some rely on their technical vocabulary, enhanced in sequences or numbers to determine a narrative, at the risk of sometimes being inconsistent by imposing a discipline unrelated to the chosen story thread. Others place the narration as the starting point for their creation, the foundation of the whole process, and enrich it with more or less technique, without really making it a prerequisite for the performance. Here and there, the notion of pure physical performance has shifted, conditioning with more or less force the flesh and soul of a show, but also structuring with new and unforeseen contours the identity of an artistic form that is no longer understood in a single way. Of course, there is always this powerful dichotomy between private companies—which are in fact linked to commercial issues—and troupes supported by a state, a city, or a region, which obviously do not have the same expectations placed on them in terms of creation and profitability. The former do not bother with the constraints of a chapiteau and organize their tours from one theatre to another, sometimes to the detriment of the delicate balance between a space and the show that must be part of it. The stage proportions are necessarily different from one stand to another and the show is clearly never really the same. The choice of the chapiteau, in terms of its size, height, and number of seats, is sometimes a decisive factor for the writing of a show, and its strength comes from this formal and structuring adequacy between form and substance. This is another economic reality, but it often determines the density of a creation.
Between circus arts, clowning, and magic, more than sixty companies have settled in Avignon this year. This wide juxtaposition of forms and disciplines is also very interesting to question on the economic level: several hundred performances are scheduled for the three weeks, and this long presence clearly has an impact on the visibility of artists and their creations in the coming months. Avignon is also a market frequented by presenters and agents—countless professionals who discover, evaluate, validate, buy, and program their respective seasons. When it comes to the circus, few festivals offer so many performances in a row to so many companies. With a duration of almost a month, the Salzburg Winterfest is probably the one that schedules the longest series, sometimes about twenty shows, and contributes greatly to filling the companies’ calendars.
Avignon is both a showcase and a crucible, a platform and a unit of measure for all the artistic forms that confront a very diverse audience. Beyond being a gigantic festival of live entertainment in all its forms, the Festival d’Avignon is also a formidable actor on a global scale; the “IN” festival issues around 140,000 tickets each year, and the “OFF” a little less than 100,000. It is, without a doubt, one of the most important events in terms of artistic resonance, and it is not surprising that the contemporary circus world has made it one of its most anticipated annual stages.
Main image: L'Occitanie fait son cirque-Ile Piot-Avignon. Photo by Pascal Jacob
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