At Avignon Festival, Theater’s World Gets Wider
Deciding who gets to perform at an international theater festival is a challenging task for organizers with limited slots. Well-known artists guarantee ticket sales, but they often represent a narrow view of global culture.
The Avignon Festival in France has the advantage of exploring unconventional paths. Each summer, it attracts a vast audience that comes for the city's theatrical atmosphere rather than specific shows. Artists in the official program typically play to full houses, regardless of their fame, encouraging directors to experiment.
This year, led by Portuguese theater-maker Tiago Rodrigues, the festival embraced novelty even more. Of the 38 artists featured, over half were new to Avignon, many unknown in France. As the festival's first week progressed, attention was given to amateurs and artists from rarely represented countries on major European stages.
Some, like the former South American inmates in Lola Arias’s “The Days Outside” (“Los Días Afuera”), performing at the Opéra Grand Avignon, expressed their astonishment at being there. One performer displayed a tattoo of the Eiffel Tower, sharing her dream of visiting France — now a reality, she said after a reflective pause during the show.
“The Days Outside” is part of this year’s focus on Spanish-language theater. Rodrigues is dedicating each year to a different language, and after a modest focus on English in 2023, he expanded significantly this time, with 12 productions — about a third of the festival’s offerings — in Spanish, from countries including Spain, Argentina, Uruguay, and Peru.
In “The Days Outside,” the experiences of five women and one trans man from Argentina are poignant. Arias, a filmmaker, writer, and director who won this year’s International Ibsen Award, began conducting workshops in a women’s prison in 2019. She created a musical film, “Reas,” about the daily lives of those she met. “The Days Outside” is a stage follow-up, depicting life after prison.
Arias avoids portraying them as victims. Instead, the show begins with them in their finest attire, declaring how long they've been free, then dancing and singing: “No one chooses their fate.” Like her film, “The Days Outside” features musical segments, revealing that some cast members formed a rock band in prison, performing some of their catchy songs.
Yet, “The Days Outside” also exposes the audience to severe hardship. Some scenes resemble documentary theater, focused on themes like unemployment and housing. Despite some awkward transitions, the performers' revelations about their lives are harrowing. They describe their imprisonment in Argentina and the struggles they faced after release, including police violence and estrangement from their children. Noelia Perez, a trans woman, recounts being assaulted for advocating for sex workers, then performs a striking voguing-inspired dance, almost as a form of personal vengeance.
It's difficult to know how to process it, as standing ovations — like the one for “The Days Outside” — can’t offer lasting solutions. Arias created a platform for her cast's powerful performances, but their future beyond Avignon remains uncertain. In the final scene, performer Estefania Hardcastle admits she can’t envision a better future.
Tiziano Cruz’s “Soliloquio (I Woke Up and Hit My Head Against the Wall)” presents an even more complex narrative, despite a lively start. Cruz, an interdisciplinary artist of Indigenous Argentine origin, collaborated with two dozen amateurs from a local community in Avignon to open the festival with a vibrant parade through the city's streets.
At the heart of “Soliloquio” lies a similar theme of pain and injustice. When the parade reaches a garden, Cruz reads a “Manifesto,” distributed to the audience, explaining his sister’s death due to negligence and discrimination in the Argentine health system, among other traumas. In this performance, he bids farewell to traditional theater structures, viewing them as a form of Western colonization.
The second half of the show, on a conventional stage, features Cruz in a long monologue, partly composed of letters to his mother during the pandemic. He laments feeling like a “traitor artist” who “sold myself to the art market,” expressing regret for leaving behind his Indigenous community. “Perdón, perdón, perdón,” he repeats — “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
As a European critic familiar with traditional theater, Cruz’s writing felt too unfocused to support his vision. However, when a show aims to highlight suffering, it seems insensitive to critique its structural flaws.
French director Caroline Guiela Nguyen has also worked extensively with nonprofessionals globally. For “Lacrima,” a new three-hour production about the dark side of the fashion industry, she assembled a cast of Indian, French, and British amateurs alongside experienced performers, portraying characters from different countries and generations connected by a fictional royal wedding dress.
“Lacrima” examines the supply chain behind the dress and its designer. We follow staff at a Parisian atelier, led by Marion, a domestic violence survivor portrayed by Maud Le Grévellec. We also see a Mumbai workshop where a talented embroiderer, Abdul Gani, is losing his sight, and a French studio restoring a precious veil.
In a single set resembling a workshop, Guiela Nguyen weaves these stories together efficiently, albeit less delicately than Gani. Marion’s abusive husband is deliberately enraging, and the story of Thérèse, an elderly lace-maker investigating her granddaughter’s possible genetic illness, becomes moving thanks to Liliane Lipau’s superb performance.
“Lacrima” highlights the invisible, often underpaid labor behind high fashion, despite the “ethical standards” promoted by the fictional designer and royal family. Avignon Festival’s efforts to tell such underrepresented stories are proving successful.
