Returning to the Festival d'Avignon

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Avignon Festival
Avignon Festival © Christophe Raynaud de Lage / Festival d'Avignon
Josie Daxter returns to the festival d’Avignon and gives us an insider’s view of what it is like to be a performer and then a spectator at this amazing event.

In July 2012, I went to the Avignon Festival for the first time.

I performed in Complicite’s ‘The Master and Margarita’ in the Cour d’Honneur of the Palais des papes, directed by the artiste associé for that year, Simon McBurney. It was an extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime experience to work there.

One year later, in July 2013, I returned to Avignon, and to the Cour d’Honneur, to experience the festival from the other side, as a spectator.

July 2012

I walk into the Cour d’Honneur for the first time. It takes my breath away. The sandstone walls of the courtyard soar tall and proud. The evening sun is baking one of them golden yellow and the italy mobile database sky above is soft blue. House martins call overhead and make swooping laps of the courtyard. A vast bank of seating, for 2000 people, fans out and up in front of me. Our wooden floor sits, a little daunted, in the middle of the huge stage, with costume rails, props tables, speakers and lighting towers spilling out on either side. I can’t wait to start work.

During the technical rehearsals we spot constellations in the sky above us. The moon, which we have grown used to seeing projected behind us, looms up for real above the palace wall.

The show takes on an epic scale in that space. We run straight through with no interval, barely leaving the stage for three hours. I set a banana on the props table and eat it during a costume change. There are clusters of named water bottles in each wing. The show picks up momentum; and the audience, renowned for heckling and leaving early, are warm, engaged and give thundering standing ovations at the end of the night.

[xylanth]

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