This minute of silence was observed at the request of the director Julie Deliquet, who is also director of a theater located in Seine Saint-Denis, the poorest department of metropolitan France.

For its first edition, the new patron of the Festival, the Portuguese Tiago Rodrigues, has chosen to open the Festival with "Welfare", a social show. It is an adaptation of Frederick Wiseman's documentary about "15 anonymous heroes for a day in a social welfare center in New York," he told AFP.

Filmed 50 years ago, this documentary "tells stories that are unfortunately still very current about the relationship between the most vulnerable and the state but at the same time with this ability to find wealth in the human comedy".

For the occasion, the Cour d'honneur was transformed into a social welfare centre, with a basketball court in the middle, benches, cupboards and mattresses around, an AFP journalist on the spot found.

At the beginning of the day, many tourists and festival-goers began to flock to the City of the Popes, in a good-natured atmosphere. Every July, Avignon is transformed into a city-theatre, divided between the "in", the official festival, and the "off", the largest live performance market in France.

The Festival d'Avignon is spread over forty venues (for 44 shows), in the city but also extra-muros, while the "off" has 140 places and hosts nearly 1,200 companies.

"Building bridges"

Another opening show: "G.R.O.O.V.E" by Bintou Dembélé, pioneer of hip-hop in France who organizes a dancing stroll.

The new boss of the event has decided to invite a language to each edition and, this year, English is in the spotlight, "in response to Brexit".

"At a time when ramparts are being built to keep us away from our British friends, we have to build bridges. It's a kind of cultural diplomacy," he says.

The director of the Festival d'Avignon, the Portuguese Tiago Rodrigues, during a photo shoot in Paris on September 15, 2022 © Joël SAGET / AFP

Even before the start of the festival, the Portuguese had to face two unpleasant surprises: the deprogramming of a highly anticipated show and the high cost of reopening a mythical place of the festival, the Carrière de Boulbon, about fifteen kilometers from Avignon.

Co-produced by the festival, "The Emigrants" by Krystian Lupa, a Polish theater master, was canceled months ago by the Comédie de Genève, where the premiere was to be held, due to a confrontation between the director, accused of abusive behavior, and the technical team.

It was replaced by a play by Tiago Rodrigues himself. "Not replacing it would have represented for the Festival d'Avignon a financial damage of more than 300,000 euros," he explains. "I could not ask artists, especially emerging ones, to replace a show at the last moment at the Opéra Grand Avignon (700 seats). It would have been a huge risk-taking and very irresponsible."

He claims not to have enough perspective on "this unfortunate episode", while specifying that "no level of talent justifies violence".

Second puzzle: the Boulbon Quarry, used for the first time in 1985 for Peter Brook's "Mahabharata" and for the last time in 2016. Philippe Quesne will create "The Garden of Delights", inspired by the painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

Due to the fire risk device, after last summer's fires in the region, 250,000 euros were added to the planned cost of 350,000 euros. The place is now "fully secure".

On the security side, this edition, which starts after several days of urban violence in France, has been reinforced at the level of mobile force units, pedestrian zones, random identity checks in public spaces and pedestrian and ATV patrols.

© 2023 AFP