Tiago Rodrigues, the new director of the Festival d’Avignon, on view four times this fall in Paris
His teachers at the Conservatory in Lisbon did not believe in his talent for the boards and he never dreamed of being a playwright, but it is as if the fairies of the theater had leaned over the cradle of Tiago Rodrigues, the new Director of the Avignon Festival. The first foreigner to be appointed head of the prestigious theatrical event since its foundation by Jean Vilar in 1947, this 45-year-old Portuguese prefers to talk about “poetic coincidences” that marked his life.
Like this “beginning of a mutual love” in 2015, when he came for the first time to the city of the popes to present his version ofAntony and Cleopatra of Shakespeare. “Coming to Avignon is like meeting Antigone. I was overwhelmed, I fell in love and, there, we got married”he jokes in an interview with AFP.
An Avignon Festival with an international focus
The artist, whose rapid speaking contrasts with the calm he exudes, has many plans for “the most beautiful festival in the world”to start with “a guest language” every year. For its first edition in July 2023, “it will be English, with several rooms”, coming for example from Great Britain, Nigeria or South Africa, “to rediscover the diversity of this dominant language, its great cultural treasures but also its historical and colonial problems”.
At the time of Brexit, “we have a duty in Europe to create new tunnels, new bridges”. New bridges also with artists who would have “an opposite vision of the theater” than his: “We must allow ourselves an aesthetic and even political contradiction”, he hammers. He intends to deepen the work already done by his predecessor, Olivier Py, to facilitate access to the festival for young people and remote audiences by establishing a kind of “first time in Avignon”; and develop the “ecological awareness” Favoriting “sustainable practices”, in the production of shows.
On display in Paris and on tour
Theater lovers have known him well since By heart (2014), when he makes viewers memorize Shakespeare’s sonnet 30. He is presenting no less than four plays in Paris this fall, written and directed by him.
The first one, choir of lovers, is the sequel to a play of the same name, created thirteen years earlier. Next October, the story of a couple put to the test and constantly questioning their love over time is played out. The playwright invite Alma Palacios and David Geselson to embody these lovers, in a refined staging, on the plaches of the Bouffes du Nord.
At the Bouffes du Nord again, he presents a controversial piece in his country: Catarina or the beauty of killing fascists. A dystopia based on the idea “of a victory for the far right in Portugal in 2028”. Deeply political, she laid bare violence in democracies by posing “a paradox: should we be tolerant towards the intolerant at the risk of leaving the democratic game? The doubt remains.
In Between the lines, at the Théâtre de l’Athénée, it is the relationship between an author and his actor that is questioned. Here, the author struggles to write his new play. Consumed by doubt, he does not hesitate to let the actor get impatient.
At the Théâtre de l’Odéon, Tiago Rodrigues resumes To the extent of the impossible, an immersion in the life of a humanitarian worker. The viewer discovers the suffering and violence of these women and men who try, sometimes in vain, to change the world. Based on interviews with humanitarian workers in Geneva, Tiago Rodrigues adopts an approach that is as poetic as it is journalistic
After a remarkable appearance last year at the Festival d’Avignon, The Cherry Orchard is performed in La Rochelle, from September 21 to 23, 2022. This play by Anton Chekhov tells the painful disappearance of a cherry orchard, carried away by modernity.
Portugal, always
These two pieces deposited as often in his work on a “journalistic or documentary research”. Nothing surprising coming from the son of a journalist and a doctor, two intellectuals who participated in the Carnation Revolution. “My father had to go into exile during the (Salazarist) dictatorship in France”, he says. Born in Lisbon after the revolution, he was “very marked by the memory of people who fought against fascism and dictatorship”. He keeps the memory, every April 25, of the great march for Freedom Day. Besides, “Avenida da Liberdade ended opposite”… of the Dona Maria II National Theater, which he directed for seven years.
By joining the Lisbon Conservatory, the beginnings were not promising, however, his teachers not being convinced by his talent. “Maybe they were right”, he laughs. He connects television journalism, writing poems, cinema, but knows that he wants to do theater after an encounter with the famous Flemish collective TG STANDwith whom he plays all over Europe. “From this experience, I kept the taste for collective work, the refusal of hierarchy and the love of words”he points out.
. “To the extent of the impossible”, from September 20 to October 14, Théâtre de l’Odéon, in Paris
. “La Cerisaie”, from September 21 to 23, La Coursive, in La Rochelle
. “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists”, from October 7 to 30, at the Bouffes du Nord, in Paris
. “Choeur des amants”, from October 8 to 29, at the Bouffes du Nord, in Paris
. “Between the lines”, from November 23 to December 17, the Athénée, in Paris