The festival opener “Nôt,” from Marlene Monteiro Freitas, drew both boos and applause. Elsewhere, for Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, the spectacle was kept to the stage.
The Avignon Festival, in the south of France, has long had an ambivalent relationship with dance.
The monthlong event, founded in 1947, is a European theater mecca where the reputation of directors and actors are made every July, while choreographers have tended to remain on the margins. In recent years, they have frequently been relegated to the festival’s later dates, when many audience members and professionals have already left.
Not this year. For the first time since 2011, dance took center stage on the festival’s biggest night: the opening performance in the monumental Cour d’Honneur, the open-air courtyard of the city’s Papal Palace. And the reaction from the theater-inclined audience was mixed on Saturday: Many looked bewildered, some left midway through, and others stayed long enough to boo as soon as the lights went down — though they were quickly drowned out by applause.
The choreographer for the show was Marlene Monteiro Freitas, from Cape Verde, whose absurdist, carnivalesque work has become a phenomenon of European contemporary dance in recent years. Still, with her Avignon opener, “Nôt,” which means “night” in Cape Verdean Creole, she arguably overpromised.
The production was billed as inspired by “One Thousand and One Nights,” the collection of Middle Eastern tales — a nod, Freitas said in the playbill, to the focus placed on Arabic at this year’s festival. (For the first time, preshow announcements were delivered in Arabic, the second-most-spoken language in France, as well as in French and English.) Yet Freitas is no conventional storyteller, and “Nôt” is more like a loose collage of scenes, with overt references to “One Thousand and One Nights” few and far between.
The style she has honed with her excellent performers relies heavily on stilted, puppetlike movements and clownish mime; for “Nôt,” Freitas has added whimsical full-face masks. Hidden behind, one performer shuffles across the stage, awkwardly cleaning the props. Another goes into the vast auditorium with a chamber pot, which he hand around the audience members while pretending to relieve himself in their laps.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com