At Avignon Festival, Theater’s World Gets Wider

Who belongs onstage at an international theater festival? It’s a thorny question for programmers with limited spots to fill. Already-famous artists bring predictable box-office returns, yet the picture of “the world” they offer rarely extends beyond a small group of countries.

The Avignon Festival, in France, is lucky to be able to go off the beaten track. Every summer, it pulls a large audience that comes to experience a city filled to the brim with theater, rather than individual productions. Artists in the official lineup typically play to sold-out crowds regardless of their reputation, and many Avignon directors have taken this as their cue to experiment.

And this year’s edition, with the Portuguese theater-maker Tiago Rodrigues at the helm, seemed to go even further. Of the 38 artists in the lineup, over half were new to Avignon, and many were unknown in France. As the first week of the festival unfolded, the spotlight shone repeatedly on amateurs and artists from countries rarely represented on the biggest European stages.

Some, like the former prison inmates from South America who star in Lola Arias’s “The Days Outside” (“Los Días Afuera”), performed at the Opéra Grand Avignon, directly expressed their disbelief at being there from the stage. One performer showed a tattoo of the Eiffel Tower on her body, explaining that it had been her dream to see France — and now, she said after a quiet pause during the show, she had.

“The Days Outside” is part of this edition’s tribute to Spanish-language theater. Rodrigues is highlighting a different language each year, and after a timid emphasis on English in 2023, he is going much further this time, with 12 productions — roughly a third of the festival’s offering — performed in Spanish, from countries including Spain, Argentina, Uruguay and Peru.