Avignon Festival: Stimulating critical thinking
Tiago Rodrigues is a Portuguese actor, director, playwright and producer. He is the current Director of Avignon Festival, in France. Since he started as an actor, 25 years ago, Tiago Rodrigues has always looked at the theatre as a human assembly: a place where people meet, like in a cafe, to confront their thoughts and share their time. His work has been recognised by his ability to break borders between the theatre and different realities, challenging our perception of social and historical phenomenon. Throughout his career, Tiago Rodrigues has become a builder of bridges between cities and countries, at once host and advocate of a living theatre.
Working in the artistic field, and especially in the performing arts, we’re better at asking questions than giving answers. And the challenge is always how to find a better way to ask questions with our artistic, gestures and those of others; and how to stick together as we ask them.
I work at Avignon Festival, a festival that has the mission of putting people together around the arts so that we can debate in order not to fight physically – instead to ‘fight’ with ideas around political and social citizenship. The arts propose this idea of being together around, or in front of, a work of art and experiencing it together collectively as equals.
Although we will all have different feelings and opinions about this individual experience it is very democratic. The debate that can come out of it pays homage to the rich diversity of the ways of looking at the world; something which is in danger when society is polarised, as is the case today in Europe and in many countries where there are only two positions – with us or against us. Being able to assume that a plurality of views and interpretations of the world is rich is maybe the vulnerability but also the great treasure of democracy. I would say that a festival is like the intense version of this daily democratic praxis.
The arts don’t only have to have this function, I believe they should be free just to express themselves. I am totally against the idea that you should attribute a role to the artists. But I think there should be a role for festivals, theatres and institutions in looking at the way society might organise to benefit from the arts. The arts are only part of the human experience. They don’t have to prove their social impact or efficiency. Artists just have to be able to work as freely and in the best conditions possible so that we collectively as a society can organise ways, bridges, that benefit the most diverse amount of people.
There is a huge difference between the reasoning of a theatre or a festival director and the reasoning of an artist. You enter two different logical frameworks. As an artist, you should do what you feel you should do. If I want to work in theatre, and something happens in the world, I feel the urge, the necessity of changing my project totally to address this issue. As an artist, you can answer to your urge in a more personal way.
I don’t see a huge difference between when I started working 26 years ago and the way I operate today. My artistic proposition is that as a citizen I feel I have to take part in society, so my pieces will more or less explicitly intervene in or try to ask questions about subjects that concern me. I try to interpret them, try to have a dialogue between my view as a citizen and my responsibility as a director. In the case of Avignon Festival, it was founded in 1947 with the help of the people who had been in the Resistance against the Nazi occupation and the collaborationist government – a festival which was defending the values of democracy – and in summer 2024 we saw clear threads in the prospect of the extreme right wing coming into government in France, a more palpable threat than ever in recent history.
Avignon Festival took a position, organised, mobilised and answered in real time the political circumstances. I think not only had we the right, we were obliged to do it. I did not shape the festival in order to answer my personal political concerns. On the contrary, it was a collective decision of the festival and many other partners in a moment when silence was not an option.
I often do pieces that are inspired by current events, or things that I have observed or witnessed. But normally I like to wait a couple of years before that becomes a piece. I need some digestion, although when I present the piece it might look like it was made for today. Sophocles wrote 25 centuries ago. Yet if you present Antigone today in certain parts of the world, it feels it was written for what is happening today. James Baldwin wrote that often we think our suffering is unique in the history of the world but we just have to read and we will find the things that express our concerns today. That is why we go back to myths. Being in touch with those narratives helps us understand life today, to understand it in a broader perspective.
One of the dangers is that we, festivals, might wish to talk about a certain issue, and because we are often the guardians of the economy and the tools of production, we might insist. There’s a dynamic of power in a festival towards artists. They need the money, the means, the space, the technical team and the human resources of the festival in order to do that work. There’s a very thin line between where my wish to address a certain subject persuades artists to go and pursuing it or forcing them to in order to access the means of production. This is where the complicity, the transparency and very close dialogue between curators, programmers and artists takes place to build programmes that are open with society and at the same time respect and fight for the freedom of creation of the artists.
This is a crucial issue today; how not to instrumentalise artists to address a social political agenda while defending the idea that festivals and theatres should be in contact with social and political values and not be in a bubble. Avignon Festival is a creation festival. So this means that more than 80% of what we present is new work. I usually describe it this way. When the team from Avignon Festival goes to see a piece what we say is ‘we loved your piece. What’s your next idea?’ We are really engaged in being with artists. We take it as our mission, not necessarily to show the best of last month’s work but being close to the people who we have identified and have a project that could work at the festival.
The margin of risk is tremendous because in April, when we present our programme publicly for the month of July, normally when we present between 40 and 50 works, we’ve seen maybe maximum ten that are either being rehearsed or will be rehearsed soon. We are a prototype festival, which is the risk but also the fascination. It creates a context for the dialogue with artists. Because Avignon takes place in spaces which are quite specific (like palaces, chapels, cloisters, gyms, places which are not normal theatre venues) that impacts the process of creation, especially if the premiere is in one of these very specific spaces. Our dialogue has to be very close in choosing the right place.
We are very engaged in the invention. Then we start to realise at a certain point each year there are common threads, invisible lines, connecting the programme. We don’t go after subject matter that unites the programme but we have some structure. For instance, every year we have an invited language. That does not force artists to treat a certain subject, but it forces us to travel to countries and regions of the world where these languages are spoken and try to discover artists from these regions. We look at the world not divided by borders or nationalities, but connected by the complexity of languages. Lines start to emerge because we see what this project has in common with this other one, and a spirit, identity or personality of the programme emerges.
It is like a wild garden. We take care of it but not too much. Then suddenly we start to realise that some plants resemble each other or some flowers have the same colour. That allows us to organise the festival and then have all the 300 debates, screen projections, concerts, etc. All the other events around it are inspired by what we identify.
When he founded it, Jean Vilar wanted to do a festival in 1947 for a society that was divided and had to have moments when it could be brought together and produce critical thinking, where disagreeing was interesting. I don’t think of Avignon Festival as for a like minded audience. I think for the public, which is diverse. I’m very happy that extreme right wing voters come to the festival as long as they do not express racism or sexism during it. When that is the case, that becomes a different kind of debate. But when the debate is about how to take a pause and plunge us into this sea of a thousand ideas per day, then it is valuable. The festival is a summer celebration of ideas and of arts, then you have the rest of the year to deal with them as calmly as possible.
We think we have to speak out, otherwise we would be taking an ambiguous position which is contrary to democracy. In hospital people cannot be mistreated. A hospital is about taking care so in a hospital there are political values. A hospital is also political. If it was not political, it wouldn’t exist. The rich would have access to the medicine and the poor would have no health care. A hospital, a festival, a theatre or a courthouse are all political inventions. I’m so sorry to announce that. So I’m okay with finding the political in every institution. I really have a problem with institutions that say, no we don’t do politics. The only reason they exist in the arts, in the culture or other fields of activity, if they’re an institution, even if they are not a state public institution, is that they stand for values. Even just for profit is a value.
Sometimes we feel powerless when we face the world but we are not alone. We should not ask of culture or the arts more than they can do. You should not expect that a thousand plays and four thousand concerts, one piece of art or even a thousand pieces of arts, however engaged they are in humane values, will be sufficient to do the political work that changes society for the better. They might make a contribution or they might be useless. In Munich, while trains took an entire people to concentration camps, they played the most beautiful music a few hundreds metres from the train station. So culture and arts are not the antidote to barbaric, horrific, things happening, but they’re also not the reason for them to happen. They can, though, be organised in a context where they are shared with an audience in a way that might work for the better in society.
What we provide to society is the richness that pays back the public investment, just like health and education. The value shared is not measurable by the box office, the sponsorship or the economy of a cultural institution. We produce value for society. The most important things in society are invisible and non measurable, like comfort, freedom, rights. Public service organisations of culture exist to guarantee that the freedom of speech and the diversity of aesthetics is accessible to the largest number, especially those who would not survive in the rules of the market.
This text is based on a transcription of the 70-Years-On Conversations: Artists Words with Tiago Rodrigues, organised by the European Festivals Association, and facilitated by Haris Pašović, Director of East West Centre Sarajevo and Artistic Director of Sarajevo Fest, and Tom Creed, Theatre and Opera Director based in Dublin, that took place online on 27 November 2024.
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