Villeneuve-sur-Lot. At the Gajac museum, a dive into the great history of the Avignon festival
The Avigon festival, Jean Vilar, Agnès Varda, it is an air of freedom and discovery that will fill the Gajac museum until March 6.
The Avignon Festival and the National Popular Theater … In 1947, it was the start of an adventure that forever changed the course of theater history in France. And it is the beginning of this story which is traced at the Gajac museum on the occasion of the exhibition “Avignon Varda Vilar, the open-air theater” which has just opened to the public.
At the origin of this exhibition, the desire, two years ago, of the museum team to present the work of Agnès Varda, official photographer of the Avignon festival from 1948 to 1959. The museum is therefore closer to the Succession Varda and Julia Fabry, collaborator of Agnès Varda for more than 12 years. And it is to her that the curator of the exhibition is delegated. “These years of artistic collaboration and friendship with Agnès Varda allowed me to gain an understanding of her work and her worlds. Go back to her beginnings as a photographer at the NPT and compare her images with the documents and costumes of the Maison Jean Vilar was followed for me by the means of highlighting creativity from the start, the openness of this theater and the desire for transversality animated by Jean Vilar “. But the health crisis has passed there and has postponed the setting up of the exhibition several times. But for Julia Fabry, “it was not a real evil. I was able to continue to explore the worlds of Agnès Varda and Jean Vilar. Immerse myself in the collections of costumes and models that Maison Jean Vilar own. And prepare a unique exhibition, adapted to the setting that is the Gajac museum. Being an exhibition curator means organizing the encounter between a work and a place, telling a unique story in a unique place. years of preparation, the project evolved. And we arrived at coherent choices. An exhibition is not just hanging pictures, it is telling a story “.
“Reinventing reality”: Agnès Varda
And history, we are right in it when we enter the large room of the museum. Gérard Philippe’s voice accompanies the visitor throughout his journey. And the immense actor, icon of the Avigon festival is present in many photos. Some are part of the memory, others unpublished. At the time, Agnès Varda was working in black and white. This is why the selection of stage costumes and set designs, all in color and which illustrate the photos, shows all the richness, inventiveness and the spirit of freedom that have reigned throughout these years. What about the gaze of Jean Vilar, in Oedipus costume (and who is installed alongside the photo) and who seems to be observing visitors. What to say in front of the look and the beauty of Jeanne Moreau in “The Prince of Hamburg” or the looks of Gérard Philippe and Maria Casarès in “Le Cid”. Or admirer of the reinterpretation, commissioned by Agnès Varda herself, of her photo of Gérard Philippe in “The Prince of Hamburg”. “The photographer always said that we had to reinvent reality,” explains Julia Fabry. “And she knew, from that period, to reinvent the reality of the theater and its representation”.
Also inscribed on the walls, these 5 words: “The sky, the night, the text, the people, the party”. These are the words of Jean Vilar when he imagined his ideal festival. A festival which was born from the proposal, in 1947, of René Char and his friends Christian and Yvonne Zervos to give a performance of TS Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral” at the Palais des Papes in Avignon. Jean Vilar then prefers to offer three creations. It was the following year that Agnès Varda became its official photographer.
History is on the move. And it continues in the adjoining room with the photos of Emile Zeizig, author of an elegant series of photographs which testify in the exhibition, of the festival and its contemporaneity. In 2003, Emile Zeizig was accredited by the Avignon festival and covered all editions since that date.