Festival d’Avignon has been organized every year since 1967. The biggest theatrical event of the year, it gathers a huge audience and transforms the city of popes into a great stage. This year’s edition, the 69th, will be unique. According to theatre director and festival organiser Olivier Py's curatorial text, ‘I am the other’ refers to the tragic attack on Charlie Hebdo. ‘Education and culture are the only chances for the future of France’, he writes. Discussions on politics and culture will certainly dominate this year's edition of the festival.
The limits of artistic freedom and the role of the artist in the contemporary world are also vague issues tackled in Krystian Lupa’s Woodcutters. The performance is a radical journey beyond the surface of cultural and social norms. Old friends from a Bohemian group meet at a dinner table. The meeting turns into a wake after one of the characters dies. ‘They allow themselves to take the "liberty" of verbalising hidden and unconscious fears, claims, injuries, and demands. The Bohemia of old turns rebellious energy into state contracts, good pay cheques, decorations, and positions’, say the play's organisers.
'Bernhard criticizes the situation in which uncompromising attitudes, struggles for a different world, and what artists want at the beginning of their career disappears. The artists make deals with the cynical men in power, they compromise to see their careers flourish. This play is about the problems of people of culture, the mechanisms that influence culture'.
– says Lupa.