“I will always be a happy man”
8:00 p.m., June 25, 2022
We find him at the FabricA, a vast theater which was delivered to the Festival d’Avignon in 2013, just before he took the reins. Olivier Py directs the rehearsals of My exalted youth, his last play. For eight hours, it unfolds its plot around a contemporary Harlequin played by the petulant Bertrand de Roffignac. Pizza delivery man with a gift for poetry, this handsome insolent whets the most improbable desires and resentments within a band of “trousers”, laughable and faded characters, also from the commedia dell’arte. “A kind of war of youth against old fools or, who knows, a manual for fighting the old against whom now I am, I have to accept it”jokes the author.
The first is played on July 8 at the Lycée Aubanel gymnasium, the very place where, in 1995, Olivier Py created The servant, a piece that lasted downright twenty-four hours. While waiting for the opening of a 2022 edition (from July 7 to 26) which should be closer to the “normal” after two years of pandemic, the man of the theater tells us about his commitments as a director, the importance of taking risks, and his post-Avignon, which he did not prepare.
“The reality of the functioning of the Festival remains very precarious”
“We always believe that this festival is powerful while it is fragile. It is said to be institutional when in truth it is fighting to exist. It’s mysterious, all that, because, on the one hand, Avignon has an international influence, an incredible prestige, its symbol is stronger than it has ever been; on the other hand, the reality of its operation remains extremely precarious. But I didn’t understand that until I got involved in the organization of the Festival. I discovered that everything had to be done with reduced means, sometimes with bits of string and not always with the help of one or the other. Tiago Rodrigues, who will succeed me [à lire à la fin de l’article], discover this fragility. This festival is based on the commitment of those who work there, around thirty permanent staff and, in July, 700 seasonal workers, artists and technicians. I remind you that, according to the figures of the Chamber of Commerce of Vaucluse, we generate more than 100 million euros in economic return on the territory of Avignon alone. At some point, you will have to bang your fist on the table. Do we still want a great Avignon Festival? Or are we going to let inflation and stagnant subsidies eat away at everything? »
“More than a threat, social anger is a tradition of the Festival d’Avignon”
“My mandate started in 2014 with the worst festival one could imagine: there were votes every day in favor of its cancellation. The indignation of the coordination of intermittent workers, while the Valls government sought to question their rights to unemployment insurance, was legitimate. But from there to want to prevent everything… How to explain to the troops coming from the end of the world that they were going to have to give up the shows in which they put all their energy? What to say to the public, who does not understand all of what is happening? It was a bit like May 68, an extremely controversial, tense and difficult moment. Even the weather was rotten! The attacks of 2015 and that of Nice, in July 2016, also had consequences that were very difficult to manage. And to security we must now add sanitary facilities, with anti-Covid standards which have been complicated to put in place. Social anger is never far away. More than a threat, it is a tradition of the Festival d’Avignon, which is above all a place of speech. On this, I have the same position as Jean Vilar: we talk as much as you want, but we go on stage and we play. Otherwise, we no longer exist! Raising the curtain is a political gesture. »
“We have made discover real great poets of the scene”
“There was first, in 2014, the Henry VI by Thomas Joly. Very impressive. As it lasted eighteen hours, I saw it several times. It was a delight. I also have dazzled memories of shows by Satoshi Miyagi, Phia Ménard and Anne-Cécile Vandalem. I have the feeling that we have made discover real great poets of the scene. The pieces of FC Bergman, a Belgian collective that we did not know in France, as well as those of the Greek choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou were also shocks. Likewise, we had to make Kirill Serebrennikov known, which is not nothing even if he did not have the expected success when he first came, in 2015 with his idiots, which had yet amazed me. And how not to mention Madeleine Louarn’s shows, created with the mentally handicapped, from which I came out each time in an extreme emotional state? »
“A director of the Festival d’Avignon must be deaf to comments”
“I took my turn in the main courtyard in 2015 with King Lear. It’s true, this show inspired a little cabal hatched by enemies I know well, including those who were already singing to have me replaced. This show was harshly received by some grumpy people in the profession who wanted my skin. It didn’t trigger any major hostility either, the audience often applauded standing up. It’s a little easy to say that an entire room is booing when there are only a few of them whistling in the middle of 2,000 people. It has a terrorist side to it, but that’s okay, it’s the court game. When the public in Avignon manifests a kind of exaltation, something vibrates that is not found in other rooms. I have nothing to do with the critics, I let them say what they want. I became quite indifferent to their comments, which was not the case when I was riding The servant [1995] we The Face of Orpheus [1997]. A director of the Festival d’Avignon must be deaf to comments, he must follow his own truth, otherwise he is lost. »
“For each of my successors, the danger will be to enter an academic system”
“There is no paradox, in my opinion, in being both institutional and protesting. Jean Vilar left us an institution in a state of watch, of questioning, of alert in the face of the world. This unique heritage means that there is a space specific to the Festival d’Avignon, that of utopia. For each of my successors, the danger will be to enter an academic system, to redo what has already been done or to summon artists that everyone knows, not to take any risks. This festival, it must be evaluated while continuing its fundamental ideas. There is something to be found there, a dialectic between heritage and invention. As director, I see everything that is played in the In, 40 shows every summer, you have to add a few that I discover in the Off. It’s very fertilizing for me: I come away full of ideas and desires for theatre. As soon as the lights go out, I am a spectator like the others, with my subjectivity, my desire to learn. And to share. In Avignon, people under 26, beneficiaries of social minima and the unemployed have places at 10 euros. This has a cost, but for me, that is enough for me as a definition of popular theatre, knowing that the tickets for Lady Gaga are 200 euros. »
“On the tax exemption, I never managed to convince the Ministers of Culture”
“I would have liked to find more patronage. It developed during my mandate, for example with the SNCF, which helped us to produce the free shows. But it would be good for civil society to get more involved. I have always pleaded for a system of tax exemption used to support performing arts, as is the case in Belgium thanks to the Tax Shelter. But I never succeeded in convincing the Ministers of Culture, who themselves would have had to negotiate with Bercy, which only grants this to contemporary art collectors. I would have liked to develop more collaborations with Asia, and with North America at the time of Trump. All the same, we have opened the Festival to the Arab world and to Mediterranean countries, such as Italy, Greece, Spain, and that is very satisfying. »
“I am not preparing anything for the future, I am not a candidate for anything”
“I’ve been running institutions for twenty-five years – the CDN in Orléans then the Théâtre de l’Odéon before the Festival d’Avignon – and yet I’ve always remained an artist and writer. The work, the encounter with a territory and other artists, has always been very invigorating for me. I can’t imagine anything worse than staying locked in my bubble. Of course, you have to work a lot to reconcile the time to write, direct, perform music hall, opera. Having no family, I have no difficulty devoting myself to it twenty-five hours a day, nine days a week. It’s what I always wanted. Today, I plan to sell my apartment in Avignon, but I don’t know where I will go next. I’m not preparing for anything, I’m not a candidate for anything: maybe I’m in denial? But at the disposal of the public theater, I will always be a happy man. And next year, I will come to the Festival. »
Tiago Rodrigues succeeds him
Founded by a man of the theater (Jean Vilar, who directed it from 1947 to 1971), long in the hands of great administrators without being engaged by artists (Paul Puaux, Alain Crombecque, Bernard Faivre d’Arcier, Hortense Archambault …), the Festival d’Avignon will be piloted, from September, by Tiago Rodrigues. First foreign artist to direct Avignon, the Portuguese director, known for his successes at the Parisian theater of the Bastille (By heart, Bovary, The way she dies), was revealed to the general public last year with its Cherry Orchard mounted around Isabelle Huppert. Avignon had programmed it for the first time in 2015, with its mischievous adaptation of Antoine and Cleopatra by Shakespeare, tightened on a game of seduction between two actors.THAT