The Festival d’Avignon, or the Avignon Festival, is an annual arts festival held every summer in July in the courtyard of the Palais des Papes (Popes’ Palace) as well as in other locations in the French city of Avignon.
Founded in 1947 by Jean Vilar, it is the oldest of such festivals in France and one of the world’s greatest. It is easily one of the biggest international festivals for contemporary live performances and attracts a large number of visitors from every generation. Well over 130,000 tickets are sold to theatre enthusiasts with around 40 works of theatre, dance, fine arts, and music to choose from.
Avignon is a city of theatre with its fabulous open-air venue, the Court of Honour of the Palais des Papes at its centre. This is where Jean Vilar directed Shakespeare’s King Richard the Second during the first ever Avignon Festival. This went on year after year, for the duration of a month.
Every summer, Avignon turns into a city of theatre, transforming its rich architectural heritage into majestic and surprising performance venues, making it one of the biggest performing arts festivals in the world.
The fledgling Theatre Arts Week, initiated by Jean Vilar and his troupe way back in 1947, was all it took to instantly transform Avignon and the main courtyard of the Popes’ Palace into one of the biggest stages for the performing arts with an international dimension. In the summer of 2013, Festival d’Avignon celebrated its 67th year.
Today the Avignon Theatre Festival attracts more than 100,000 entries. Last year it recorded a massive 93% occupancy, demonstrating the enduring passion shared by a constantly increasing public.
Over the decades, the Cour d’Honneur has morphed into a mythical and spectacular venue, inviting 2,000-plus spectators to share the love for theatre, sometimes from nightfall until the break of dawn… living magical moments when spectators and artistes applaud in unison at memorable shared performances.
Inspired by the Festival d’Avignon which she had visited during her innumerable visits to France, Yasmin crafted a very interesting theatre programme many, many Julys ago. For this she collected several video clips related to the festival, its birth and growth, and everything around it.
She transformed our little studio at the French Embassy into one of the green rooms of the Avignon Festival. There was a full length mirror strategically placed to get Chintha’s best camera angle. There were racks with hangers full of costumes. There were props of various shapes, sizes, and kinds strewn all over. There were crowns and capes, spears and swords, bags and boots, what-nots and whatever-nots. It was one holy mess, chaotic, yet very effective visually.
For a change we began presenting this programme deliberately un-made-up. With each sequence presented we added on the (intentionally heavy) make-up and spoke to the camera through the mirror. The effect was interesting. By the end of it all we were fully made up with Yasmin turning out to be a pretty princess, crown and all.
I cannot remember how or why this happened, but with my white painted face, I ended up a pantomime’s dream, feeling much like the French actor, director, mime artiste Jean-Louis Barrault when he portrayed the 19th Century mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau (Baptiste Deburau) in Marcel Carné’s legendary film Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise, 1945).
That was not all. Yasmin wanted the ending to be as dramatic as possible. And so as we ended presenting the Festival d’Avignon from the chaotic confines of the dressing room, Yasmin delivered her parting lines and delicately lay down on the carpet. I don’t know if she was to have been dead or not, but anyway, half crouched by her side, I grabbed the nearest sword (a wooden one painted silver to resemble metal) and breathlessly spluttered my lines “…. blah blah blah … see you next week ….” I then managed to gasp an “Au-revoir”, before plunging the sword into my heart, with a well-rehearsed flourish, and instantly fell stone-cold dead onto the dead or sleeping Yasmin.
Closing credits
French Cancan theme music
The end.
“The Bonsoir Diaries” by Kumar de Silva is a cocktail of chapters, bursting at their seams with pithy asides, a trail of faux pas, and tit-bits from behind the scenes, marinated with anecdotes and drizzled with nostalgia, revealing everything you never saw on your favourite television show… from the ‘80s through the ‘90s into 2000.
