Dead Children, Resilience, and Diversity

The seventy-fifth Avignon Festival, exceptional in terms of its overall quality and pensive, rather than ebullient, mood, and in its penultimate year under the direction of playwright and director Olivier Py, proposed “Remember the Future” as its underlying theme. To this seemingly paradoxical directive, the works presented in the official, or “in” festival (sixty in all) nevertheless spoke with almost a single voice: the “remembered” future will be marked by insecurity, pain, and destabilization. Most of the significant productions “re-membered,” then, the ongoing confusion and malaise of lives under Covid, in addition to gesturing to the multiple horrors characterizing the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These productions projected the coming emotional trajectory as a journey through darkness—a repetition, if not an intensification, of a cataclysmic past. This is not to say that the festival featured plays about Covid, epidemics, or viruses. In fact, there were almost none of those, including among the 1,070 productions in the fringe, or “off” festival. What was remembered and bodied forth was, instead, the affective landscape of the pandemic: dread, exhaustion, and stasis.