Cour d'Honneur, Palais des Papes 
Court of Honour, Popes' Palace: Imagine a man, naked save for black shorts hiding a harness, climbing all the way up this facade in the silence of night, not even followed by the light of a projector. His bare hands and feet clinging to the ancient wall's asperities, he makes his way up with amazing ease. For a while he stops in the centre of the rosace, hanging there arms outstreched like a Christ on the cross before continuing his ascension towards the black sky. That was the start to the extraordinary show that opened the Festival d'Avignon last night: 'Inferno' by Romeo Castellucci. I saw it.
Inferno par Romeo Castellucci, Festival d'Avignon 2008
Cour d'Honneur du Palais des Papes : imaginez un homme, nu à part un short noir cachant un baudrier, escaladant toute cette façade jusqu'en haut dans le silence de la nuit, même pas suivi par la lumière d'un projecteur. Ses gestes souples et sûrs le collent aux aspérités centenaires du mur. A un moment il se pend au milieu de la rosace comme un vivant Christ en croix avant de reprendre son ascension vers le ciel noir, toujours en silence... c'est le début de l'extraordinaire spectacle qui a ouvert le Festival d'Avignon hier soir : "Inferno" de Romeo Castellucci. Je l'ai vu.
Before the show, this is what you could read :
"Romeo Castellucci is sometimes referred to as an iconoclast. He himself says that he creates meaningless theatre which has an immediate impact on the spectator (...) You will be able to experience what it is like to be inexorably swept along into his world. This time around the performance is a divine comedy. Dante's 'La Divina Commedia' is a poem in three parts about a journey to hell, purgatory and finally, paradise. 'Inferno', part one, will be created on the gigantic stage of the Cour d'Honneur in Avignon, in the palace where the first French pope, Clement V, resided. The pope allows Dante to descend into the inferno. We are confronted with man's confusion, the fragmentation of the community and the darkness of art." (
source). Read the full blurb about it
in English on the official Avignon Festival website.
To fully appreciate the show, forget everything you know about theatre: no more than twenty words are spoken during the 2 hours and 30 minutes that the performance lasts. Think visual. Imagine sixty people on stage creating striking effects with their bodies: hordes of men, women and children of all ages walking slowly like an army of zombies. Humans approaching others who stand still, motionless, and slicing their throats in a ritual killing until no-one remains. Bodies falling silently, gradually forming a sea of corpses. Bodies rolling in dust, in water, in the flames of hell. Never a word, no eye contact between these people, as if being isolated in a crowd was the first step to hell. A piano burns, eight watchdogs bark furiously, a white horse turns in meaningless circles, a huge black veil makes a ballooning appearance on the side wall and waves softly in the wind before falling to the ground. Flickering lights appear from the medieval windows as if people were walking up the stairs and along the corridors before it all turns to a menacing frenzy of lightning and thunder. Throughout the show the ears are subject to over-saturated sounds: loud crashes, distorted Gregorian chants, shrieks, stone walls crumbling down. Do we really have to go through this?
I am yet to read the reviews that came out this morning. Should the piece be lauded or torn to pieces ? Frankly it is often exasperating. Some expensive effects seem pointless or redundant, slowing down the rhythm. Many aspects of it are irritatingly complacent, something commonly seen in other forms of contemporary art. If there are to be no lyrics then the choregraphy should be sharper than it is. You can't just think you're adding dramatic intensity by filling the public's ears with unnerving noises. But if the essence was to let us experience hell, mission accomplished. The people seated next to me went through hell for 2 hours and 30 minutes. They left their seats furious.
I'll remember the silent man climbing up this facade in the dark of night and several other striking images.
Festival d'Avignon 2008 - Inferno de Romeo Castellucci
La Divine Comédie de Dante est divisée en trois parties, l'enfer, le purgatoire et enfin le paradis. Pour cette création, 'Inferno', Romeo Castellucci s'inspire librement de la première partie, l'enfer. Lire ici la longue présentation du metteur en scène et de la pièce sur le site officiel du Festival d'Avignon.
Pour apprécier, oubliez tout ce que vous savez sur le théatre. Moins de vingt mots sont dits durant les 2 heures et demie que dure le spectacle. Pensez succession de tableaux visuels utilisant l'impact d'un groupe de soixante personnes avançant en masse comme des zombies, se croisant sans se voir ni se toucher, tombant devant la mort, se roulant dans les flammes de l'enfer, s'égorgeant mutuellement, faisant une mer de cadavres. Cohortes de déportés hagards, villages entiers massacrés, il n'est guère difficile de retrouver l'histoire contemporaine dans ces tableaux d'horreur. Et jamais de paroles ni même de contact visuel entre ces gens, comme si l'enfermement individuel au sein de la foule était le premier des enfers.
D'une fenêtre médiévale à l'autre une lumière apparaît, comme si quelqu'un montait un escalier à l'intérieur puis suivant d'invisibles corridors. Elle se transforme ensuite en frénésie d'éclairs et de tonnerre. Un piano brûle, huit chiens de garde aboient tout leur saoûl, un cheval blanc fait une apparition incompréhensible, le martèlement de ses sabots nous claque dans la tête, un immense voile noir gonfle le long de la façade, s'anime avec la brise de la nuit et finit par s'affaler sur scène. L'accompagnement sonore est violent, dur : chocs, éboulements de pierres, chants grégoriens distordus, musique effroyablement grésillante comme jouée sur un mauvais pick-up au son poussé au maximum. Un univers sonore saturé, déformé, agressif... Alors, réussi ce spectacle ? Parfois exaspérant. On y trouve des longueurs qui cassent le rythme et un usage complaisant d'artifices dénués de sens - complaisance qu'on retrouve malheureusement souvent dans d'autres formes d'art contemporain. La chorégraphie, qui devient centrale en l'absence de texte, devrait être bien plus travaillée. On ne peut pas se contenter de remplir les oreilles du public de sons insupportables pour créer l'intensité dramatique. Mais après tout si le sujet était l'enfer eh bien oui, mission accomplie. Pour mes voisins ça a été l'enfer pendant deux heures et demie, ils sont sortis furieux.
Moi je retiendrai l'homme escaladant cette magnifique façade dans le silence de la nuit et quelques autres très belles trouvailles visuelles.
Festival d'Avignon 2008 - Inferno de Romeo Castellucci
Life's a theater but the show is over for now. The Festival d'Avignon is coming to an end. Until next year!
Avignon hides a remarkable number of delightful private courtyards. Some hide behind heavy wooden doors, some are open for visitors to see, when they are curious enough to look under a dark porch.
This very young girl worked for a non-permanent tattoo parlor and was copying a pattern for a client when I spotted the rat sleeping under her hair. She gave me permission to take a picture. The rat's name is Fleur, she's had him for four months and he spends all day on her shoulder.
With so much going on during the Festival, it's hard to be noticed sometimes. A white statue stood proudly at the bottom of the stairs leading to the Popes' Palace entrance but it was a quiet spot. Most of the pedestrian traffic was further down where jugglers, dancers and other human statues were already competing for attention. This one hardly got noticed and it's a defeated Roman emperor that I saw a little while later.
Moving shadows on a gray wall, white linen curtain blowing under the light breeze... how little you need to convey a sense of Mediterranean summer in the heat of day!
Japanese medieval song and dance: the song was a repetitive whine with very nasal sounds, amazing to listen to even if not particularly pleasant to my untrained ear. The Avignon Festival attracts street performers from all over the world and I have seen dancers from Brazil, tango guitar players from Argentina, jugglers from Spain, a potter from Tunisia... in fact there's so much happening in the street that some of the visitors to the Avignon Festival don't go and see a play at all, they're just happy to stroll around town and enjoy the street performances.
During the Avignon Theater Festival there are so many plays to choose from (over 800) and competition is so fierce that everyone is looking for new marketing tricks to sell the play. Running around town distributing flyers is what everybody does but if you want to be noticed and remembered you'd better be creative. Wearing a bright and colourful costume helps...
... add extraordinary or silly accessories,
... sitting inside a trash container and making faces,
... But the public is often just as fascinating to watch as the actors!
Once upon a time there was an abandoned orchard. The neglected apricot trees had all caught the same disease: their fruit started to rot before they had a chance to ripen. One day a princess entered the wild garden. She was sad to see all those beautiful trees laden with rotting fruit. But she was savvy and bright: she picked kilos of fruit just before rot caught them and made a delicious apricot jam for all her loved ones to share and enjoy.
Walking through the streets of Avignon in July is such an amazing experience: posters, posters, posters everywhere. On every wall and every lamp post, tied to every waterspout, fence, railing or window bar... Over a thousand shows and plays are on during the Festival so competition is fierce! Although this wild posting can be perceived as visual pollution, it is part and parcel of the incredible spirit of creativity that takes over the city for a month.
Teaser on place du palais: Commedia dell'arte brought to you by second year students of the International Academy of Live Arts, directed by Carlo Boso. The young actors are incredibly energetic and the show mixes singing, dancing, mime, music, sword fights and fun references to today's life and news. Three plays directed by Carlo Boso are shown every day during the Festival d'Avignon: Il Falso Magnifico at 10:30 am, Scaramuccia at 6:30 pm and Twelfth Night at 6:45 pm. Carlo Boso is one of the finest masters of Commedia dell'arte in the world. On the 15th of July, his company had a free show on the place du palais showing excerpts of the three plays and more. He set this up with the view that the public should always be at the center of the Festival d'Avignon, as willed by its founding director Jean Vilar.
Beautiful red sunset last night... but the weather is stormy this morning.
On a hot summer day, nothing beats messing around with water. In the fountain on place Pasteur, a little girl is fighting with a cherub for control over the water flow. I had already shown you this fountain here but in reflection only.
Yesterday afternoon I happened to be walking past at the right time so I was invited to the premiere of an exceptional show: it is held under a beach umbrella and takes a maximum of eight people! It's called the PPCA - le Plus Petit Chapiteau d'Amiens, Amiens' Smallest Big Top (Amiens is a town in the north of France). The public sits in a circle on tiny stools under the umbrella. There is no room for the actors to stand in the middle so they stay outside and just slip their heads through gaps in the curtains to say their lines. The show lasts all of ten minutes (OK, maybe fifteen) and was played by three young girls. They said four little pieces, among which a story by Claude Ponti (French author of humorous children's books) and a poem by Jacques Prévert called "you must be polite with the moon" (in French and in full here). Thanks to Camille, Caroline and Marie for their wonderful performance. If you want to find them in Avignon, you'll need a bit of luck because their big top moves all the time. Just a few minutes after the show, the umbrella and stools had been folded away and the PPCA was ready to move on to a new location. Contact the PPCA : 03 22 93 38 47.
From the street looking in, a stolen photo taken through the kitchen window of a city café.
Every day during the Festival theater companies walk around town presenting their shows, distributing flyers, often wearing their stage costumes and sometimes acting little excerpts from the play. This young man was part of a cast presenting 'Juliette et la clé des songes' by Georges Neveux (1934), a surreal play where dreams and memories are so intertwined with reality that it becomes impossible toknow which is which. I haven't seen it but the reason why I'm showing this photo is the tattoo running down the young man's arm. They are lines from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence (read the full poem here)
Tous les jours durant le Festival d'Avignon des acteurs se balladent en ville pour faire la promotion de leur spectacle. Très souvent habillés en costume de scène, ils distribuent des tracts et jouent parfois de petits extraits de la pièce. Ce jeune homme au visage très expressif faisait partie de la troupe qui présentait 'Juliette ou la clé est songes', une pièce surréaliste de Georges Neveux (1934) où les rêves et les souvenirs se mêlent si intimement à la réalité qu'il est impossible de les distinguer. Je n'ai pas vu la pièce, mais si je vous présente cette photo c'est pour le tatouage sur le bras de notre héros du jour. Il s'agit d'un extrait du très long poème de William Blake Augures d'Innocence (lire le poème entier ici en anglais) - en voici une traduction personnelle :
'Avignon Off 2008 - Juliette ou la clé des songes
Have you ever bought your fruit and vegies at a second hand shop? This place is amazing: The owner, Tristan, age 75, repairs shoes and sells second hand clothes and shoes, mountains of them piled high in his dark and old shop. Into the depths of it is his workshop, lit by a single neon light. On the counter, his little dog sleeps right in front of a fan, enjoying the wind on his nose. Outside on the pavement, protected from the sun (?) by a tiny pram umbrella are cases of apricots (1.70 euro/kilo), peaches (1.90 euro/kilo) and nectarines (3 euros a tray), all from Tristan's family in Boulbon, a small village just a few kilometres away. The fruit you see here were picked this morning and were never refrigerated - it's the closest you can get to picking your own. A hand-written note says 'lettuces and tomatoes are indoors in the shade. Please inquire within'. The elderly people love to stop here for a chat. It's a shop that will die with its owner. In the meantime, I buy my apricots at my shoe repair shop and I love it.
Meet Lino, the clown in black who performs every afternoon on Palace square (place du Palais). Here he is during his show (below) and taking a rest (above). His real name is Simon but shhhhh, I never told you that.
Festival d'Avignon 2008on 2008, spectacle de rue
... except that the next day all the posters are gone. BNP Paribas (a famous French bank) obviously disapproved of this massive assault. In order to access more advertising space, the ladder is today's must-have fashion accessory in Avignon - to be worn on the shoulder, preferably accompanied by a friend carrying the posters.stival d'Avignon - le Off 2008
Yesterday I saw a show that delighted me: Confidences from the birds, summer migration.
Night-time entertainment on Place de l'Horloge. The light was very dim but apparently enough for the artist to work. I didn't want to use the flash, it would have disturbed him. The sketch was excellent, it really looked like the model. Two or three artists were there, offering to make your portrait. Have you been to Place du Tertre in Montmartre in Paris where there are dozens of them? Have you ever had your portrait done ?
A few weeks ago a series of posters appeared in the streets of Avignon:
Festival d'Avignon - Incident du Tricastin 8 juillet 2008 - pollution du Rhone
The living statues you often see in touristy places around the world use various techniques. One I saw further down on place de l'Horloge changed positions every time he was given a coin - a great incentive to give! His creative poses delighted the public. This one, also very successful, chose the absolutely no move option. His all-white outfit was a perfect match for the gorgeous background of the Pope's Palace. A note at his feet said he could keep the same pose for up to an hour. Eyes peacefully closed, where does his mind take him for such a long time? Is he accutely aware of the crowds around him, listening to every voice and move, or detached in semi-meditation?
Court of Honour, Popes' Palace: Imagine a man, naked save for black shorts hiding a harness, climbing all the way up this facade in the silence of night, not even followed by the light of a projector. His bare hands and feet clinging to the ancient wall's asperities, he makes his way up with amazing ease. For a while he stops in the centre of the rosace, hanging there arms outstreched like a Christ on the cross before continuing his ascension towards the black sky. That was the start to the extraordinary show that opened the Festival d'Avignon last night: 'Inferno' by Romeo Castellucci. I saw it.
Before the show, this is what you could read : "Romeo Castellucci is sometimes referred to as an iconoclast. He himself says that he creates meaningless theatre which has an immediate impact on the spectator (...) You will be able to experience what it is like to be inexorably swept along into his world. This time around the performance is a divine comedy. Dante's 'La Divina Commedia' is a poem in three parts about a journey to hell, purgatory and finally, paradise. 'Inferno', part one, will be created on the gigantic stage of the Cour d'Honneur in Avignon, in the palace where the first French pope, Clement V, resided. The pope allows Dante to descend into the inferno. We are confronted with man's confusion, the fragmentation of the community and the darkness of art." (source). Read the full blurb about it in English on the official Avignon Festival website.
The Tour de France starts today, but I doubt this bike will be in. On the frame you can read Jacques Anquetil - Made in France. How many bikes sold in France today are actually made in France? 
However the poster that made my day yesterday is the one above announcing a free concert on Place Pie (Pie square) in celebration of Ingrid Betancourt's return to freedom. Ingrid, who was held hostage for over six years in the Colombian jungle by the FARC leftist militia, was freed yesterday thanks to an extraordinary rescue mission led by the Colombian army. Being half French, half Colombian, Ingrid is a national hero here and the news of her release brought extraordinary emotion. Read more about it here.
Continuing with my forbidden photos. Will you recognise yesterday's detail in today's image? View over Avignon's rooftops from the Grand Tinel Hall in the Popes' Palace. Click here for a inside view of this huge dining room of massive proportions, it's really worth it. The Grand Tinel Hall takes up an entire floor of the Consistory wing. The word « tinel » was used in Italy and the south of France to mean dining room or refectory. « Tinellum » comes from the low Latin « tina » which means barrel or casket.
1st of June Theme Day: "NO..." : I had no permission to take this photo : in the room where I took it, 'no photo' signs were everywhere. But very small and I didn't see them. True. So here's a forbidden photo of the rooftops of Avignon as seen from inside the Popes' Palace. No special effects; I'll show you tomorrow how I did it.
