Magec / the Desert from Radouan Mriziga, 2025 © Louka Van Roy
“I am you in words”, wrote Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. This could be the motto of the Festival d’Avignon, after nearly eight dazzling decades. Today as in the past, the words, gestures, sounds, and images of the artists, allow us to be the other, revealing the many-sided, radiant beings that we humans are. We do not tell stories merely to survive, like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights. We tell stories to live together, and to learn how to do so better.
Being together means blending with one another. Whether from Paris or Beirut, Kigali or Berlin, Orléans or Marrakech, artists and technicians from some fifteen countries will gather this summer in Avignon to meet their audiences and build an ephemeral but very real utopia: that of being together. This human assembly is the very DNA of theatre. We remember, we predict, we pass on, we question, we doubt, we translate, we imagine, we desire… All in the first-person plural, with all our differences. At the Festival d’Avignon, diversity is a treasure. We cherish this democratic dialogue where, through art, different visions of the world can meet and converse. All year round, Avignon vibrates to the rhythm of Avignon, Terre de Culture 2025, a programme that celebrates curiosity. Let us cultivate this curiosity for the future and renew the drive for decentralization, democratization and cultural exception that began after World War II – an unfinished but precious movement that has borne much fruit and will continue to bring us together. In a world where authoritarianism sow the seeds of war, threatens democracies, denies the climate emergency, and obscures any vision of the future, let us use every moment together to imagine new paths forward. The Festival d’Avignon is a stage where the future is constantly being reinvented. For a month, or for a lifetime, let us be free and inventive. Let us celebrate, without ever forgetting the tragedies of the past and present. Let us celebrate, because the future is calling us. Let us be the other in words, for that is the most beautiful way to be fully ourselves. Together.
–Tiago Rodrigues / Director of Festival d’Avignon
Magec / the Desert from Radouan Mriziga, 2025 © Louka Van Roy
Magec / the Desert
Radouan Mriziga
Morocco – Belgique / Created in 2025
Radouan Mriziga explores the knowledge of the desert, weaving together rhythms, gestures, and stories to question its relationship with time, nature, and the cultures that inhabit it.
In Magec / The Desert, Radouan Mriziga explores the wisdom of the desert and its relationship with time, light, and movement. From the Sahara to the steppes of Central Asia, the desert becomes a space of reflection where myth, literature, and cultural knowledge intertwine. His dance, inspired by the rhythms, crafts, and embodied practices of desert peoples, reveals a harmony that escapes all forms of domination. Driven by a polyphony of texts, sounds, and gestures, the performance invites us to perceive the abundance that exists within this silent vastness, and to reconnect with the intelligence of the natural world.
Derniers Feux, Némo Flouret, 2025 © Quentin Chevrier
Derniers Feux
Némo Flouret
France – Belgium / Festival d’Avignon 2025 Creation
In the instant before a firework explodes, eleven performers, in a tempest of images, dances, and abandoned objects, persist in creating one last show.
Fireworks fascinate with their ambivalence. Their explosion evokes celebration as much as war. They unite as much as they startle, blending fear with excitement. Drawing inspiration from the images they conjure and memories rooted in our collective consciousness, Derniers Feux focuses on the moment just before the explosion, a suspended time from which dreams emerge. Surrounded by dancers and musicians, Némo Flouret conjures up this sense of turmoil, this grey zone, buffeted by opposing winds, capturing the full beauty of pyrotechnics: expectation, anticipation, hope, frustration, astonishment… To the sound of trumpets, broken melodies, and shattered rhythms, their relentless, continuous dances exalt the present, as if the show they are piecing together were indeed their last, forever.
When I Saw the Sea, Ali Chahrour, 2025 © Kassim Dabaji
When I Saw the Sea
Ali Chahrour
Lebanon / Created in 2025
Through song and dance, three women rise up against a system that, in Lebanon, subjects migrant workers to a form of modern slavery.
On stage, three women. They are Ethiopian and Lebanese. In a Lebanon ravaged by bombs, they struggle to escape the kafala system, which subjects migrant workers to a form of modern slavery and makes them even more vulnerable to the hardships of war. Lebanese choreographer Ali Chahrour brings these three women to the stage for the first time, driven by the urgency of making their voices heard and celebrating their spirit of resistance. Through song, movement, and speech, Zena, Tenei, and Rania tell their stories and those of hundreds of others. At the crossroads between dance, music, and theatre, When I Saw the Sea transcends categories to return power to the bodies, exalting the vital force of those who are both witnesses and heroines of our times.
lirious Night, Mette Ingvartsen, 2025 © Bea Borgers
Delirious Night
Mette Ingvartsen
Denmark – Belgium / Creation Festival d’Avignon 2025
Far from daytime’s rules and social codes, the night presents itself as an intoxicating world where community becomes possible. Inspired by the Middle Ages’ dancing mania, Mette Ingvartsen’s Delirious Night is a ritual of liberation and healing.
The night invites celebration. Freed from the rules and codes that govern the day, it presents itself as an intoxicating world, full of desires and dangers. Mette Ingvartsen’s Delirious Night is experienced as a ritual, inspired by the dancing mania of the Middle Ages, carnivals, masked balls, and other celebrations that suspend social order. The Danish choreographer observes her era and the way bodies react to periods of crisis. On stage, nine men and women surrender to a delirious night of music and dance, inhabiting this alternative space where one can finally build a community. Their bodies, confronted with excess and collective frenzy, oscillate between joy and sadness, hedonism and exorcism, conformity and resistance.
Coin Operated, Jonas&Lander, 2025 © Dmitrij Matvejev
Coin Operated
Jonas&Lander
Portugal / Created in 2019
Halfway between installation and performance, Jonas&Lander, riding mechanical horses, present an interactive and unpredictable show that denounces animal exploitation, amid bucking and prancing.
As Coin Operated opens, the audience finds the artist duo Jonas&Lander seated on rocking horses in a heavy silence. Simply inserting a one-euro coin into the slots of these machines brings the installation to life and gives way to the performance. Amid bucking and prancing, the history of the relationship between rider and mount unfolds, from domestication to exploitation. Designed for unconventional spaces, Coin Operated invites the audience to play an active role and directly influence the course of the performance unfolding before them. An interactive and unpredictable show that brilliantly critiques mercantile society and animal exploitation.
Every-body-knows-what-tomorrow-brings-and-we-all-know-what-happened-yesterday, Mohamed Toukabri © Stef Stessel
Every-body-knows-what-tomorrow-brings-and-we-all-know-what-happened-yesterday
Mohamed Toukabri
Tunisia – Belgium / Created in 2025
Inspired by questions of memory and identity, this solo virtuoso explores the language of dance, blending hip-hop, personal history, and collective heritage to create a poetic and political journey. A tribute to the encounters that shape us.
In this solo, Mohamed Toukabri turns his choreographic gaze inwards to explore the very essence of dance. The Tunisian choreographer embarks on a sensitive journey, using the virtuosity of bodies to break down the hierarchies between hip-hop and contemporary dance cultures, and shape a poetic and politically engaged space. With the words of Tunisian playwright Essia Jaïbi as a backdrop, Toukabri explores notions of memory and transmission through movement. He creates a fluid temporality where bodies bearing intimate narratives enter a dialogue with collective history, questioning the colonial influences inherent to contemporary dance and working to dismantle the established norms. His is a quest for a transformation of bodies and perceptions alike, which transcends languages and borders.
Le Soulier de satin, Éric Ruf, Comédie-Française, 2025 © Jean-Louis Fernandez – coll. Comédie-Française
Le Soulier de satin de Paul Claudel
Éric Ruf – Comédie-Française
France / Creation 2024
Almost forty years after Antoine Vitez’s production, this monumental and mystical drama returns to the Cour d’honneur, with Éric Ruf and the troupe of the Comédie-Française taking on Claudel’s language.
Le Soulier de satin (The Satin Slipper) is the one that Doña Prouhèze, wife of Governor Don Pélage, entrusts to the Virgin to slow her steps towards Don Rodrigue. In the vast, ever-expanding world of the Renaissance, the lovers – driven by their desire for an absolute love – are drawn together and torn apart across continents. This epic drama, monumental in scale, was first published in 1929; in 1987, Antoine Vitez presented it at the Festival d’Avignon, in a production that remains legendary. Nearly forty years later, Le Soulier de satin returns to the Cour d’honneur, brought to life by Éric Ruf. Rejecting any liturgical formality, the director reveals the theatrical power of this language, magnificently embodied by the troupe of the Comédie-Française.
MAMI, Mario Banushi, 2025 © Andreas Simopoulos
MAMI
Mario Banushi
Albania – Greece / Created in 2025 / First time in France
Mario Banushi celebrates the different maternal figures that shape our lives. A creator of visual poems, the Albanian-born artist tries to untangle the endless knot of our emotional heritage.
As a child, Mario Banushi grew up with more than one mother. Barely a year old, he was entrusted to his grandmother, who raised him until he was thirteen. He then moved to Athens with his mother, where he lived above the bakery where she worked, surrounded by women of all generations. It is to these women – to this maternal figure with a thousand faces – that MAMI pays tribute. By asking who, ultimately, is taking care of whom, Banushi tries to untangle a relationship so complex that a lifetime would not be enough. Now twenty six years old, this Albanian-born artist – creator of an original and resolutely multidisciplinary stage language – has already toured the world. With MAMI, he develops a visual poem, a landscape of memories through which the performers move to confront their own recollections and emotional heritage.
Taire, Tamara Al Saadi, 2025 © Christophe Raynaud de Lage
Taire
Tamara Al Saadi
France / Created in 2025
Weaving together the fates of Antigone and Eden, a teenager tossed between group homes and foster families, Tamara Al Saadi delivers a powerful cry that pierces the silence and echoes through the ages.
Weaving together the threads of Eden’s life and Antigone’s destiny, Tamara Al Saadi shows us two youths observing each other through the ages: on the one hand, a teenage girl placed in foster care and endlessly shuffled between families and group homes, and on the other, a mythical heroine who dares stand against royal power to bury her brother. Both are “daughters of nobody” who collide with a system seemingly trying to crush them. Drawing on social science research, this French-Iraqi playwright creates shows that aim to build bridges between shores, languages, and territories. A choral production featuring twelve performers, TAIRE is a soundscape of noises, songs, and electric guitar, and delivers a cry that pierces the silence and resonates through the ages.
Nexus de l’adoration, Joris Lacoste, 2025 © DALL E
Nexus de l’adoration
Joris Lacoste
France / Creation Festival d’Avignon 2025
If a religion were to be created today, what would its liturgy look like? Joris Lacoste imagines a colourful and musical ceremony, brimming with humour and poetry.
In a world where we feel we belong to multiple groups but where our experiences are unique, Nexus de l’adoration celebrates heterogeneity by imagining a new religion whose mission would be to sing the praises of all things in the world, from electronic cigarettes to Dragon Ball Z, from Argentine tango to humpback whales. During a ceremony that looks a little like a musical, nine officiants weave together absurd invocations and pop choruses, galvanising speeches and unsettling confessions, deadpan stories and R’n’B choreographies. Playing with the juxtaposition and collision of disparate elements, Nexus de l’adoration creates a community for a future world, giving voice not only to a universal and homogeneous ideal, but to a joyful symphony of differences and dissonances.
Festival d’Avignon / 79th Edition
July 5–26, 2025 / Festival d’Avignon
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