Engaging Identity: Politics, Culture, Feminism

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Avignon Festival, Avignon, France, July 5–25, 2023.Helmed by the Portuguese theatre-maker Tiago Rodrigues, its first non-French director, the seventy-seventh Avignon Theatre Festival affirmed the idea of theatre as a laboratory for political action and a pulpit for querying identity. In pointedly opening the official or “In” festival to works in English, Rodrigues emphasized French (and thus European Union) solidarity with the UK—despite Brexit; and in foregrounding the latest documentary-inflected work by the Swiss director Milo Rau, he widened the festival’s political purview to the world via the Amazon—positing its potential ecological demise. Moreover, and even more stunningly given the festival’s history of programming, by deliberately bookending the official program (forty-four works) with creations by Black French women, Rodrigues unsettled the ways in which France’s race-blind policies have marginalized French artists of color, who have rarely been featured in mainstage Avignon productions. Finally, by inviting startling works by justifiably angry women creators, he acknowledged the unrelenting violence that haunts women’s daily reality.This catalogue of works and themes reveals just how far the original goals of the Avignon Festival, founded by Jean Vilar in 1947, have shifted. Vilar understood theatre as a public service, meant to unite French people through access to the classics and through performances by generous and charismatic francophone actors, well-trained to handle expertly crafted texts in the vast space of the Honor Court of the Papal Palace. Heroic and revolutionary in its day, Vilar’s concept of theatre has given way to the inescapable internationalism of France, its changing demographics, and a renewed commitment to and reassessment of what equality might actually mean. France can no longer be seen as the “exceptional” nation, richer in artists and intellectuals than most, assured of its standing as a beacon of democracy and republican values. It is instead a country, like most, struggling with the aftermath of colonialism, the ravages of neoliberalism, and a political class that appears incapable of addressing major social problems. It is fitting, then, that most of the significant productions at the 2023 festival grappled with issues that progressive theatre worldwide is also confronting: ecological destruction, war, immigration, racism, and patriarchal blight.Milo Rau’s extraordinary Antigone in the Amazon (performed in the Vedène auditorium), the last piece of a trilogy he has devised to deal with some of the planet’s most pressing concerns, began to take shape when Rau was touring Brazil with La reprise (2018), a work targeting gay bashing, based on an actual incident in Liège, Belgium. Members of the Brazilian Movement of Landless Workers came to him for help with orchestrating their resistance efforts to save the Amazon. Energized by their commitment to protect the forest from agribusiness and other, often greenwashing, forms of multinational exploitation, Rau and actors from his Ghent-based company set about interviewing movement members, most of whom were rural, many of whom were indigenous. All had been traumatized by events in 1996, when police opened fire on a peaceful demonstration meant to halt the building of a trans-Amazonian highway. Nineteen people had been killed.In consultation with movement people and his actors, Rau settled on Sophocles’ tragedy as an apt frame on which both to graft the collective “no” of the protestors and to dramatize their deaths in 1996. Performed by four live actors in Portuguese and Flemish, Rau’s Antigone in the Amazon is simultaneously projected on stage as a filmed version of the massacre. An indigenous performer portrayed the filmed Antigone, while survivors of the massacre and other Brazilian activists interpreted other characters, including the chorus. In characteristic Rau vocabulary, onstage actors fell into and out of the fiction, announcing what they were doing and commenting on their feelings about it. In spite of this metatheatrical gesturing, flawless transitions between scenes and registers, propulsive and intensely focused acting, filmic close-ups and simultaneous onstage echoing of the same action enhanced the emotional impact and potential for identification. Shimmering, organic colors and soulful Brazilian laments helped add some lightness to what was, in the end, an apocalyptic story: for if the Amazon goes, so does the world. Rau brought to Avignon the leaders of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, who took their place among the actors during the bows at the end of the show. In this, he stayed faithful to his vision of political theatre, one that does not substitute bourgeois empathy for the actual pain of victimized people.Dans la mesure de l’impossible, Rodrigues’s own production, staged at the Avignon Opera, could, perhaps, be accused of silencing victims, as it was constructed on interviews conducted with humanitarian workers based on their experiences rather than those of the people for whom they cared. Yet the four superb storytellers who conveyed the interviewees’ stories never succumbed to heavy-handed realism. Instead, speaking as though embedded in not-for-profit operations dealing with a gamut of crises in the so-called “developing world,” they told pensive tales of treating battle wounds, feeding starving children, and extirpating from their captors’ gangland torture victims. They reminded the audience again and again that they were just actors playing people who had saved and lost other human beings—and, in the process, saved and sometimes lost themselves. Rodrigues’s docufiction asked the kinds of questions that have no answers, but need to be continuously asked: Is it normal for some people to be addicted to this kind of work? Is it normal for most people not to pay attention to the disasters that call for this kind of work? And why do these disasters happen in the first place? For the first time in a long time, the shadow of Peter Brook graced the festival, thanks to the production’s apparent simplicity and the charm of the storytellers. They manipulated in full view of the audience the folds and drapes of the canopied space that isolated specific story-telling moments, while a virtuoso onstage percussionist helped structure and punctuate the narrative.The choreographer and hip-hop specialist Bintou Dembélé, whose work introduced the festival, also performed in the Avignon Opera space, but with the intention of deconstructing it, thereby destabilizing a certain idea of conventional theatre, replacing cohesion with detached performances first in the street and then in the nooks and crannies of the Opera’s bowels, ultimately uniting audience and dancers on the main stage. A bit of an unwieldy mash-up, G.R.O.O.V.E., nevertheless, had several spectacularly successful moments. Backstage, behind the fire curtain, a Black body lay in the midst of the milling spectators, immobile in the corner of the available space. Slowly, youthful mourners dragged and attached the body to a noose which was lifted up to the flies, as thirty effigies of other hanged people descended. Meant to be a tribute to the Arab teenager killed by French police just ten days before the festival began, the visuals also connected the plight of French youth of color to the lynching that took the lives of so many Black Americans in the course of the twentieth century.The global impact and connective tissue of the Black Lives Matter movement thus concretized, Dembélé next projected a documentary video linking the street art of krump with traditional dancing by Dalit people in India, suggesting an aesthetic solidarity among oppressed peoples wherever they live. She further highlighted the twisted and pounding movements of krump, and its psychological effect, by reprising her now famous choreography for Clément Cogitore’s 2017 staging of Rameau’s Les Indes galantes—filling the main stage of the Opera with forty dancers, many of them youths from France’s troubled projects. They performed meticulously staged choral movements and athletic solos, all conveying the obsessive and explosive energy of young people released from historical and class constraints. Widening the immersive thrust of the production, the krumpers became DJs, switching the music and inviting the audience to rock along with them, which it did: spectators, too, released (at least for the moment), from collective guilt over the distressing situation of descendants of immigrants still living in segregated communities.While Dembélé, whose parents are Senegalese, strove to achieve status and recognition for hip-hop dance forms and other street arts of the underprivileged, Rébecca Chaillon, whose parents are Martinican, sought in her queer performance piece, which closed the festival, to abolish the clichés smothering and delimiting the Black female body. A large woman and robust presence, Chaillon took risks and shocked, introducing her Avignon production, for example, by spending fifteen minutes scrubbing the stage floor on hands and knees and slowly undressing to reveal a sweating, whitened body and zombified eyes. Carte noire, nommée désir, which she created and directed, made fun of the many ways Black French women have been represented, interpreted, and exploited. She imagined the visual pun of a coffee-cup tree to skewer the popular coffee brand Carte Noire, whose advertisements indirectly eroticize the “always desirable” black body and whose business plans keep African cacao farmers from realizing a reasonable profit. She read aloud creepy personal advertisements in which white men of a certain age look for love and a nursemaid in one Black woman, someone who “does not expect to be paid very much.”With eight other stellar Black women performers, each of whom shared a personal story with the audience, Chaillon mimed black and white objects or situations and asked the audience to guess what they were. This politically touchy game so enraged certain audience members that security guards had to be called to calm things down. When the actors left the stage to collect, without asking, the audience’s bags and purses, and then dumped them on the side of the stage to demonstrate “colonization,” several people rushed to grab their belongings and deserted the theatre—white people, that is, as all of the African-descended women had been invited to sit on stage with the actors. That there were at least fifty African-descended women on stage at the Aubanel High School (in a house of five hundred) indicated not only that the French population is no longer exclusively white, but also that the festival audience reflects this transformation. The final tableau refocused on the coffee tree, repurposing it as a source of new beginnings by creating living roots out of the actors’ bodies and by texturing the trunk with ropes tied to Chaillon’s braids, ropes no longer signaling bondage.Even more daring, if not more politically provocative than Chaillon, was Carolina Bianchi, whose performance piece, A Noiva e o Bo, Noite Cinderela, amped up the rage and despair prevalent in other shows of the “In” festival that dealt with abusive men. A significant increase in killings and wife-beatings, often understood as connected to the Covid lockdown, have been on the minds of European theatre people for several years now, with several past shows in the “Off,” or fringe festival, dealing with the question. Nothing, however, compares to how Bianchi made use of her own body to advance on the Aubanel stage an image of extreme vulnerability and, in the end, nihilism. For night after night, she ingested on stage the “Cinderella drug” that rapists drop into unsuspecting women’s drinks in order to knock them out and violate them. And, after giving a stirring lecture on how misogyny and patriarchy operate to stop women in their tracks—referencing in particular the rape and murder of another performance artist, Pippa Bacca—Bianchi indeed collapsed, turning her inert body over to a team of Dantesque figures who proceeded to insert a camera into her vagina, projecting on several screens that which should be her most private and mysterious body part. Her uterus, the site of life’s beginning, the promise of future humanity, was thus exposed as so much vulgar meat, meat to be consumed, pulverized by men whose sexual desire is only prompted by violence. This, the most controversial show of the festival, dragged on until Bianchi came to, alert enough to accept the thunderous applause of an audience more shaken than moved.Between the official festival and the some fifteen hundred shows in the fringe, nearly two million tickets were sold. The fringe, dating from 1972, had been the traditional home of protest theatre—as well as every kind of theatrical and musical entertainment imaginable. This year, protest held sway in both “In” and “Off” festivals. Protest, conveying the potential for change, has brought optimism back to the stages in Avignon. Healthy, aesthetically eclectic, visually arresting, and in-your-face, the 2023 festival harkened back to the kind of international theatre of the 1970s that was meant to upset, divide, and, in the end, inspire action. Judging from some of the critical commentary in France’s more conservative papers, in its attempt to shake things up, Tiago Rodrigues’s first iteration of the Avignon extravaganza was a roaring success.