As the City of the Popes marks eighty years of its official festival and sixty of its unruly offspring, both prove why the trip is worth making.
It is July, and as every year, theatregoers and artists from all over the world only have one destination in mind: Avignon and its two concurrent festivals, on through 25 July. Both events mark a round number at once: the IN celebrates eighty years, the OFF turns sixty. Same city, same three weeks, same cobblestones, but two entirely different ways of holding a mirror up to the world. While the IN is a carefully curated, cerebral institution that defines trends and pushes intellectual boundaries, the light-hearted OFF is, ironically, everything the mother event is not. And yet, they happily coexist and cross-pollinate.
Avignon IN: Eighty Years of the ‘Beautiful Doubt’
Tiago Rodrigues, the Portuguese director who has steered the IN since 2022, has never been one for easy applause lines, and this anniversary edition is no exception. Rather than mount a victory lap, he has built the 80th Festival d’Avignon around a single, deliberately uncomfortable idea: the question mark as an act of resistance.
In a moment thick with bad, oversimplified answers, Rodrigues is betting that forty-seven shows and eighty debates can do something a soundbite cannot: hold a room in doubt long enough for real conversation to happen.
Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage / Festival d’Avignon
That conviction runs all the way to the closing night, when L’Aube des questions will gather dozens of artistic, political and civic voices in the Cour d’honneur du Palais des Papes to pose, publicly, eighty unanswered questions, one for every year of the festival’s life. By doing so, Tiago Rodrigues says, “we affirm the beauty of doubt and uncertainty.”
As has become tradition in recent years, every edition now features an “invited language”. After English, Spanish and Arabic, it is Korean – a first for an East Asian tongue, and a deliberate leap outward following a twenty-five-year absence of Korean artists from the Avignon stage. Hangeul, the alphabet King Sejong commissioned in the fifteenth century specifically to fight illiteracy, gets its own thematic thread: Korean theatre, dance and reinterpreted pansori will run alongside a keynote presence from Nobel laureate Han Kang. Rather than a novelty booking, this move is an argument that democratising a language and democratising a stage are, for Rodrigues, the same gesture.
Courtesy Festival d’Avignon
Festival IN Highlights
- L’Aube des questions*, 23 July, Cour d’honneur du Palais des Papes. Eighty public figures, eighty questions, one closing ceremony built entirely around not knowing the answers.
- The Korean thread, throughout the festival. Contemporary reinterpretations of pansori and traditional Korean forms sit alongside politically charged Korean theatre and dance: the festival’s most ambitious linguistic invitation to date.
- Transmission Impossible*, dates to be confirmed. Choreographer Lia Rodrigues takes over this international summer laboratory from Mathilde Monnier, bringing in students from her own dance school in the Maré favela of Rio de Janeiro.
- Première fois*, now in its fourth year. The festival’s newcomer-access programme has nearly doubled its reach since 2023, proof that Avignon is still eager to welcome first-timers, not only established companies.
Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage
Avignon OFF: Sixty Years of Raucous Answers
Two streets from the Cour d’honneur, the mood changes entirely. Where the IN whispers its reflections in hushed, monumental spaces, the OFF shouts its répliques from every wall in town.
This year the numbers alone are staggering: 1,432 companies, 1,780 shows, 27,000 performances squeezed into 141 theatres, a sprawling, self-funded, wildly uneven marketplace in which a single play can make or break a young company’s entire year in the space of three weeks.
For its sixtieth edition, the OFF has chosen the Mediterranean as its guest of honour, a choice that, unlike previous selections (Taiwan and Brazil), looks inward rather than outward. Avignon is, after all, a Mediterranean city, and this year’s “Lumière” programme, featuring sixteen productions from Cyprus, Spain, Israel, Italy, Morocco, Monaco, Palestine and Turkey, reads as much like a family portrait as a cultural exchange. In a region defined by fractures – geographic, cultural and ideological – placing Israeli and Palestinian companies on programme sheets side by side is a courageous curatorial act.
The OFF remains, on the numbers, a largely Parisian affair wearing a Provençal holiday dress: 533 of this year’s participating companies come from Île-de-France, more than double the 182 that call Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Avignon’s own region, home.
The French Riviera confidently stakes its presence against Parisian dominance: three of its most exceptional companies, nationally and internationally known, are flying its colours in this year’s OFF. They bring with them very different registers under a shared broader theme: social control, memory, revenge. And all four plays arrive at some version of the same question: what does a person become when the system, the grief, or the injustice leaves no other way to answer back?
COLLECTIF 8: LE MEILLEUR DES MONDES
4–25 July (dark Thursdays) | La Factory, Théâtre de l’Oulle
Photo © Collectif 8
Collectif 8 returns to Avignon with Le Meilleur des Mondes, having garnered critical acclaim and sold-out houses in its first run last year. The second chapter in Gaële Boghossian and Paulo Correia’s trilogy of dystopian adaptations, which began with their landmark 1984, splits the stage vertically behind a scrim onto which video floods a world of “obligatory happiness”, where a humanoid AI in the shape of a stereotypically perfect blonde doles out soma and slogans in place of freedom. Four performers strain against the glass of that engineered contentment, turning the production’s real question, whether one can rebel against happiness itself, into something closer to a dare than a discussion. Critics have already billed it as one of the Top 50 plays of this year’s festival.
COMPAGNIE MIRANDA: CHARLOTTE
4–25 July (dark Wednesdays) | Théâtre du Balcon
Compagnie Miranda‘s adaptation of David Foenkinos’s novel made its Avignon debut in 2025, filling Le Balcon with more than 2,500 spectators. This year, an even more refined version of this play traces the short life of painter Charlotte Salomon, murdered at Auschwitz at twenty-six, through the visual language she left behind rather than the horror that ended it. Thierry Surace directs and performs alongside Jessica Astier, Julien Faure, Sylvia Scantamburlo and Jérôme Schoof, with live music threaded through the staging.
COMPAGNIE MIRANDA: NIKI, LA FEMME AU FUSIL
4–25 July (dark Tuesdays) | Théâtre du Roi René
Video via Shootmi&Cie on Vimeo
Where Compagnie Miranda’s Charlotte looks inward at a life consumed by history, Niki explodes outward in colour. Adapted from Caroline Deyns’s Trencadis and co-directed by Surace and Jessica Astier, the piece follows the life of Niki de Saint Phalle: the childhood trauma she transmuted into art, the world of male artists she walked into and refused to be diminished by, and the act of shooting at canvases as something closer to therapy than performance. Fierce and joyful in equal measure, this play embodies the spirit of Saint Phalle herself. One of the favourites at Cie. Miranda’s home stage Théâtre de la Cité in Nice, Niki already drew over 1,000 spectators in its Avignon debut last year.
FÉLICIEN CHAUVEAU: DUMAS, LA PLUME ET L’ÉPÉE
4–25 July (dark July 10 and 17) | Théâtre La Luna
Félicien Chauveau stages the argument that Alexandre Dumas, grandson of an enslaved man, built Edmond Dantès as the version of himself capable of taking the revenge he could not take in real life. Written by Jean-Félix Lalanne, the play erodes the boundaries between text and music, but also between people and characters, and slowly the creation begins dictating to its creator. Édouard Montoute leads a cast staging the uncomfortable question beneath the swashbuckling: how far is anyone entitled to go to right a wrong?
Courtesy Bulles de Culture on Instagram
Eighty years on, Avignon is still measuring itself against Vilar’s original dream: to make theatre at once public, demanding and shared. Both festivals do that, each in its own way. The IN cultivates the space for questioning and doubt, the OFF dramatises its fallout through fragmentary narratives, sudden joys, stubborn rebellions and intimate reckonings. And between them, Avignon has become a lab of humanity, a place where thought and feeling collide, and where theatre keeps reminding us how complicated, and how necessary, the “other” is, on stage and in life.
Both festivals are on through 25 July at various venues across town. For detailed programming information, venues and addresses, and ticket booking, visit their relevant websites:
PHOTO CREDITS
- All photos and poster courtesy Festival d’Avignon, and as credited
- Lead image © Christophe Raynaud de Lage / Festival d’Avignon
- Instagram post and video as credited
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