This year’s IN honours the elegance of Arabic expression while the OFF answers with creative exuberance
Every July, Avignon sheds its genteel medieval poise to become the world’s most intense theatre crucible. The city itself morphs into a sprawling stage, a labyrinth of streets and squares pulsating with ambition, sweat, and whispered promises. Theatre transforms from mere art into a relentless force of urban life. The 2025 Festival d’Avignon, now in its 79th year and running from July 5-26, crystallises this duality between the institutional and the insurgent, the measured and the anarchic, embodied respectively by the IN and the OFF.
While the IN offers audiences a prism through which to engage with theatre as a carefully crafted and curated intellectual experience, the OFF embodies unpredictability and democratic abundance, injecting all its lifeblood into the festival.
Avignon IN — The Enchanting Diversity of Arabic Art and Language
Palestine’s national poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) once wrote, “I am you in words,” and the 79th Festival d’Avignon places those words at its beating heart. At the helm of the IN festival since 2022, Tiago Rodrigues has asserted a rare intellectual rigor, steering the IN towards a fiercely political and poetic project. This year, his decision to centre Arabic as the festival’s ‘invited language’ transcends tokenism.
Arabic, the world’s fifth most spoken tongue and France’s second, is conspicuously absent from mainstream French culture. Avignon rectifies this with uncompromising clarity. The festival refuses to exoticise or confine Arabic to familiar tropes of conflict or migration. Instead, it foregrounds the language’s artistic vitality, its capacity for nuance, myth, and philosophical depth.
The festival’s mission statement reads like a manifesto: Arabic, the organizers insist, has been “taken hostage by merchants of violence and hate.” By putting artists from Syria, Tunisia, Lebanon, Morocco, Iraq, and Palestine centre stage, Avignon 2025 becomes an act of linguistic archaeology, unearthing the poetry buried beneath geopolitical rubble. Each dialect carries its own geography of loss and longing, its own way of pronouncing hope.
Rodrigues’ programming challenges the usual frames, inviting audiences into conversations about belonging, resistance, and the poetic re-imagining of history. This is cultural intervention by design, a counterpoint to the homogenising narratives that dominate European discourse. Theatre becomes diplomacy, art becomes resistance.
The lineup reveals the depth and diversity of Arab creative voices, featuring large outdoor participatory installations and cutting-edge choreographic works to immersive music-poetic evenings anchoring the Arabic language as a vibrant cultural force at the Festival d’Avignon IN 2025.
Festival IN Highlights
La Voix des femmes | 14 July 2025 | Cour d’honneur du Palais des Papes
A concert which pays homage to the legendary Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum, featuring performances by Natacha Atlas, Souad Massi, Camélia Jordana, Abdullah Miniawy, Danyl, Maryam Saleh, and Rouhnaa. Directed by Zeid Hamdan, the concert commemorates the 50th anniversary of Oum Kalthoum’s passing with a rich musical programme.
Nour: Une célébration poétique de la langue arabe | 15 and 16 July 2025 | Cour du lycée Saint-Joseph
Thus is a night-long event celebrating Arabic through a blend of music, poetry, dance, and visual arts. Artists such as Emel Mathlouthi, Naïssam Jalal, Tania Saleh, and Walid Ben Selim contribute to this immersive homage to the language.
Radio Live — Chapitre 3: Réuni·es | From 16 to 21 July 2025 | Various venues in Avignon.
The immersive audio-visual performance explores themes of community and connection through the Arabic language, combining live radio broadcasts with theatrical elements to create a unique theatrical experience.
One’s Own Room Inside Kabul | From July 16–24, 2025 | Salle des Colloques, Cloître Saint-Louis
This immersive installation invites audiences into a reimagined Kabul, blending visual art, sound, and narrative to explore themes of identity and displacement.
Avignon OFF – The Untamed Beast, The Joyful Chaos
In its sixth decade, the OFF 2025 includes a staggering 1,700+ shows from 1,300+ companies across 139 theatres and venues in a frenetic, often brutally competitive market. Here, theatre is commerce and survival intertwined. Every ancient stone wall becomes a billboard battlefield, layered with posters until the medieval architecture disappears beneath a riot of fonts and promises. Actors in half-costume wander the streets, accosting café patrons and pedestrians with desperate charm. Street corners bloom with impromptu performances: a juggler here, a mime there, a soprano belting arias to startled pigeons. The smell of rosé mingles with the scent of stage makeup and freshly photocopied paper. Companies with mini budgets hand out their flyers under a merciless sun, rig their own sets, and share dormitories, betting everything on fleeting encounters with audiences. Success in the OFF is a rare alchemy of grit, talent, and chance. This is pure, noisy, joyful chaos.
In the OFF, the editorial line of “Arabic” no longer applies; anything goes. Brazil steps in as the OFF’s guest of honour, adding South American rhythms to the IN’s Arabic cadences throughout the city’s ancient squares. Brazil’s presence transforms the OFF into a cross-cultural carnival. Samba rhythms spill from makeshift stages, capoeira circles form in ancient squares, and Portuguese mingles with French in café conversations. The Brazilian contingent brings its own theatrical DNA: bold physical performance, magical realism, and an infectious energy that perfectly matches the OFF’s democratic chaos.
Heeding the OFF’s gravitational pull, companies from across France contribute to its cultural fireworks. Paris sends some of its finest plays and stars. So does virtually every other French city that has a theatre. And Nice brings a distinctively coastal blend of cosmopolitan energy and theatrical innovation with some of its own top companies and actors.
Festival OFF Highlights
How could one possibly pick among so many brilliant, original, moving, and exciting plays? We will just have to go by our personal favourites. For detailed information, please visit the programme.
Majola | through 26 July (check for days off) | Théâtre des Corps Saints (Salle 2)
A long-standing hit in Paris, this gripping psychological thriller stages a tense interview in an ’80s Munich hotel between a U.S. journalist, his Jewish cameraman, and Irène Kalder, forcing questions of guilt, denial, and memory. Marc Francesco Duret leads with calm intensity alongside Caroline Darnay and Duncan Talhouët. Critics call it “a must‑see” for its intense, mirror‑like confrontation.
Dissonances Jeanne d’Arc | through 26 July (check for days off) | Théâtre des Carmes
Fusing humour and erudition, this co-production of Cie. dire-dire with Théâtre National de Nice dissects and deconstructs the myth of Joan of Arc in a fierce, innovative “radio-debate” format. Directed by Frédéric de Goldfiem, it lines up some of Nice’s most respected actors, including Frédéric Rey and Cyril Cotinaut. Reviewers describe it as “funny and corrosive” and “a fight of ideas wrapped in a clever debate”.
Niki, la femme au fusil | through 26 July (check for days off) | Chapelle des Templiers (Théâtre du Petit Louvre)
Inspired by Caroline Deyns’s biography Trencadis, this vibrant piece by Cie. Miranda is the intimate story of Niki de Saint Phalle, an artist who drew from her wounds the source of an infinite talent. Thierry Surace, director of Théâtre de la Cité in Nice and of Compagnie Miranda, and Jessica Astier jointly direct and perform alongside Julien Faure, bringing to life the great Parisian sculptor’s creativity and resilience.
Charlotte | through 26 July (check for days off) | Théâtre du Balcon
Based on David Foenkinos’s novel, Cie. Miranda’s second play in this year’s OFF is a poignant portrayal of Holocaust survivor Charlotte Salomon. Adapted and directed by Thierry Surace, it examines art, memory, and loss but is, beyond its historical dimension, above all a play where the emotional power of live performance takes precedence over mere factual reconstruction. The artistic lineup includes Jessica Astier, Julien Faure, Sylvia Scantamburlo, Jérôme Schoof, Jonathan Silve (musician), and Thierry Surace.
Two Festivals, One Vision
The marriage of IN and OFF creates something unprecedented: a festival that speaks in multiple registers simultaneously. While the IN wrestles with Arabic’s contested meanings, the OFF bursts with Brazilian exuberance, creating a cultural polyglot that reflects our interconnected, complicated world. The IN refines and cultivates theatrical art, the OFF allows and encourages unbridled artistic freedom. What both have in common is that theatre engages rather than escapes. Together, they create what the festival calls “an ephemeral but very real utopia”; the kind we desperately need and might just outlast July’s final curtain call.
Whether through fiction, storytelling, or essays, Boualem Sansal has for over forty years embodied the voice of freedom, resistance, and the awakening of conscience.
Now imprisoned in Algeria for making his voice heard through the power of his writing and the diversity of his registers, the Festival d’Avignon and its artists wish to express their support for the French-Algerian writer.
Lead image © Thierry Surace; all other images as credited