Festival d'Avignon
Photos: NeedCompany's Sad Face | Happy Face, A Trilogy, Three Stories on Human Nature
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| Country and Region | France — Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur |
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| Type of Festival | Dance, Drama |
| Location of Festival | Avignon, Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur, France |
| Festival Address Information | Festival d’Avignon |
| Festival Description | The mission of the Festival is to showcase French and foreign contemporary drama and dance creations and stage performances in general—about forty productions each year, to an ever-growing audience (around 100,000). There are about twenty, rather unusual, performance venues in Avignon and near the the city including cloisters, churches, the famous Pope's Palace, an old stone quarry and school halls.Each year the Festival changes its programme which, since 2004, has been determined with an associate artist. It is largely composed of productions which, when the Festival's artistic director selects them, have never been performed in front of an audience before. In fact, many of them are first seen on stage in public at the Festival. |
| Festival Dates | July 7 - 29, 2009 |
| Festival Links | http://www.festival-avignon.com/ |
Festival Events:
Artist/performance feature 2009:
- Jan Lauwers & Needcompany — This summer Needcompany will be presenting the long-awaited French premiere of The Deer House and the SAD FACE | HAPPY FACE trilogy at the Avignon Festival. Needcompany starts with the trilogy in the Chateaublanc (Parc des Expositions) on 12th July 2009. In this trilogy on humanness, Jan Lauwers stages the plays Isabella’s room (2004), The Lobster Shop (2006) and The Deer House (2008) together in a single evening, thereby showing four years of work with his unique ensemble. In the past season, The Deer House has toured in Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland. The SAD FACE | HAPPY FACE trilogy has previously been shown at the Salzburger Festspiele and in Zurich.
- SAD FACE | HAPPY FACE trilogy — Chateaublanc, Parc des expositions: 12, 14, 18 July 2009, 4:00pm (16:00)
“An ode to life and art from the point of view of suffering and death. This will not suit strict TV-traditionalists who want psychological realism, but it’s a real pleasure for anyone able to appreciate theatre as an all-embracing work of art - drama, music, performance, dance and art. Each of the three pieces stands on its own, but the full performance offers something more; it builds a bridge between the past and the fear of the future, and then back to the present again, with the loss of loved ones at its core, all linked to an individual quest.” - Sueddeutsche Zeitung, C.D. 4 August 2008. Anna Hohler declared Jan Lauwers’ SAD FACE | HAPPY FACE the most important production of 2008 in Ballet-Tanz’ review of the year.
Participants: Author, director, set design Jan Lauwers | Music Hans Petter Dahl, Maarten Seghers | With Grace Ellen Barkey, Anneke Bonnema, Hans Petter Dahl, Viviane De Muynck, Misha Downey, Julien Faure, Yumiko Funaya, Benoît Gob, Tijen Lawton, Maarten Seghers, Inge Van Bruystegem | A production by Needcompany | Coproduction Salzburger Festspiele, Festival d’Avignon, Théâtre de la Ville (Paris), Schauspielhaus Zürich, Théâtre Garonne (Toulouse), La Rose des Vents (Scène Nationale de Villeneuve d’Ascq), PACT Zollverein (Essen), Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York), welt in basel theaterfestival, Cankarjev Dom (Ljubljana), Automne en Normandie (Le Havre), La Filature (Scène Nationale de Mulhouse), Kaaitheater (Brussels), deSingel (Antwerp) | With the support of the Culture 2000 Programme of the European Union, the Flemish authorities. - THE DEER HOUSE — Chateaublanc, Parc des expositions: 13, 16, 17 July 2009, 5:00pm (17:00)
“Grace occupies a unique position in The Deer House. She is … a go-between for the antitheses around which this latest Flemish masterpiece by Jan Lauwers and Needcompany revolves: life and death, and appearance and reality. The Deer House is a genuine fairytale. As a result of the various interwoven realities, the schizophrenia of war and the idiocy of ‘the story’ (which is non-existent) become sharply tangible.” - De Volkskrant, MvdL, 20 April 2009.
Participants: Author, director, set design Jan Lauwers | Music Hans Petter Dahl, Maarten Seghers, except “Song for the deer house” | With Grace Ellen Barkey, Anneke Bonnema, Hans Petter Dahl, Viviane De Muynck, Misha Downey, Julien Faure, Yumiko Funaya, Benoît Gob, Tijen Lawton, Maarten Seghers, Inge Van Bruystegem | A production by Needcompany and Salzburger Festspiele | Coproduction Schauspielhaus Zürich, PACT Zollverein (Essen) | With the collaboration of deSingel (Antwerp) and Kaaitheater (Brussels) | With the support of the Flemish authorities.
- SAD FACE | HAPPY FACE trilogy — Chateaublanc, Parc des expositions: 12, 14, 18 July 2009, 4:00pm (16:00)
Other Sources:
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Podcast Interviews:
- If you like this festival — listen to…
- Anne Tismer, actress
http://kadmusarts.com/blog/?p=395 - Linda Brumbach, Founder of Pomegranate Arts
http://kadmusarts.com/blog/?p=462 - Greg Sandow, music critic and composer
http://kadmusarts.com/blog/?p=499
- Anne Tismer, actress
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