last day at the Off d’Avignon 2022 festival
That’s it, the Avignon 2022 festival is now over! The latest performances of the Off festival took place this Saturday, July 30, a few days after the end of the In festival. The streets of the intramuros of Avignon are emptied of their festival-goers and see many rolling suitcases. Like that of Annie, who leaves to take her train to Normandy. After a week in Avignon and 14 shows seen, she sent that it’s time to go home. “Already because it’s very hotshe smiled, but also because we are so enriched by all the shows we have seen that we don’t want to see more, otherwise there will be saturation. We have to digest everything we have enjoyed”.
Like festival-goers, professionals also thrive on find some peace and quiet. “The energy that kept us going for more than three weeks is starting to fade, but we are happy to have had a great Avignon, and there is the joy of the work accomplished”, summarizes Jean-Baptiste Derouault. In charge of distribution, he accompanies 9 shows of the Off 2022 festival and was pleasantly surprised by the attendance.
“In the end, it went well. We had a lot of professionals, programmers, and on all the shows we accompany, so it’s positive. Because it’s also the promise of a tour if the programmers liked the show. There are few occasions in the life of a show to meet the public as much as in Avignon”, he explains. Above all, he specifies, that a large part of the companies present in the Off festival perform at a loss and invest to be able to present their work in Avignon.
A level of attendance encouraged
And overall, the Off d’Avignon festival as a whole found attendance levels close to 2019, before the Covid. The Théâtre des Halles, for example, reached 85% of the 2019 attendance level this summer, compared to 65% in 2021. “So that means that there is a very clear progression, and that we will perhaps find peaks next year”hopes Alain Timar, director and artistic director of the Théâtre des Halles.
Alain Timar also says he felt a the desire of the public to find the live showafter two years of pandemic and health protocols. “The big surprisehe explains, is that the rooms turned out to be full from the first day of July, the 7th, whereas usually, we prefer three days to four days to really start. I think there was a real desire from the public to reconnect with live performance and to rediscover this direct relationship between the spectator and the stage”.