From our special correspondent in Avignon.
Thanks to this exhibition, we relive the highlights of the largest theater in the world created by Jean Vilar in 1947. Thus, Child of the choreographer Boris Charmatz, staged with professional dancers and a group of children from Rennes, in the courtyard of Honor at the Palais des Papes in 2011. Or, the same year, the adventure of Condemned to Death, the long poem by Jean Genet, told by Jeanne Moreau and Étienne Daho.
Laurent Gachet, the curator of the exhibition guides the visitor inside the Maison Jean-Vilar. The route is delimited by intimate lighting. With 130 unpublished photographs and films projected on screens, Christophe Raynaud de Lage intends to offer an “ultra-sensitive account of the Avignon festival” which he has been following since 2005. It is successful.
Live performance lovers remember slices of life, so many enchanted parentheses. Exceptionally, they have the right to go behind the scenes of the city’s heritage sites. In addition to the main courtyard, which has had a facelift in 2021, the Carmelite cloister, the chapel of the White Penitents and the Boulbon quarry located fifteen kilometers from Avignon.
Like out of time, these places have known good times. No one has forgotten Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, masterfully staged by the brilliant Simon McBurney, on Wednesday July 11, 2012 at 11:58 p.m. (Christophe Raynaud de Lage immortalizes the directors’ wishes and their dialogue with the public noting the exact times). We also remember Thyeste, the dark tragedy of Seneca, imagined as an opera by the gifted of the stage, Thomas Jolly in 2018. What memories!
“The present eye continues, at the Jean-Vilar house, 8 bis, rue Mons, until July 25, then from September 5 to March 30, 2024.
