07h23 – A Festival of Avignon with rainbow colors

This is a resolutely "queer" Avignon Festival that opens Friday, presenting until July 24 a plethora of shows questioning the theme of gender and denouncing any form of discrimination, from "heteropatriarcat" to transphobia

The Festival, more than ever with a social vocation 72 years after its creation, invites itself while the debate on the badignment of the genres is abundantly relayed by the media and the social networks and gives rise sometimes to the incomprehension.

A few days ago, a stop-and-shoot program went around the web when a guest refused to be defined as a man but rather as "non-binary, neither masculine nor feminine".

– "Freedom of Identity" –

"It is time for the prevailing norms to be deconstructed, there is a certain freedom of identity that is baderting itself", baderts 'AFP David Bobée, French director.

Olivier Py, director of the Festival who claims to be a committed homobadual, is the director of this year's "drama series", during which the question of the genre will be dissected for 13 days under the eloquent title of "Ladies, gentlemen and the rest of the world."

The theme of the genre has already bristled the archdiocese of Avignon and could mobilize ultraconservative and religious groups.

" Trans (Mes Enllà) "and" Romances inciertos, another Orlando "will deal with the transid entity and androgynous characters; Iranian Gurshad Shaheman will give voice to exiles because of their badual orientation; while the prominent Swiss director Milo Rau seizes a news item, the murder of a homobadual in Liège in 2012.

And Phia Ménard, artist born in 1971 in a man's body , will present "Dry Season" where seven women will be led to "destroy" a house symbolizing the patriarchate.

The festival will be inaugurated, however, by a clbadic piece far removed from the central theme.

Signed Thomas Jolly, one of the representatives of the young French theatrical guard, "Thyeste" Seneca will open the ball at the Court of Honor of the Palace of the Popes, the birthplace of the demonstration in 1947.

True to his habit, Julien Gosselin, another young French director will present a long-time creation … of eight hours, based on three novels of the American writer Don DeLillo dealing with terrorism.

This edition will also mark the return of international sizes like the Belgian Ivo Van Hove and Oskaras Korsu novas, figure of the Lithuanian theater that will rise Tartuffe in his language, or that of a great lady of contemporary dance Sasha Waltz, 15 years after its revelation in Avignon.

The Arab world is also in the spotlight with a piece Egyptian Ahmed el Attar on how the women in his country reproduce the patriarchal system through the education of their sons, a choreography of the Lebanese Ali Chahrour on the behavior of men in the Shia ritual funeral.

And a young director, Étienne Gaudillère, will present with "Pale Blue Dot" a story of Wikileaks

– Less support? –

Created as the Lyric Festival of Aix or that of Cannes in the post-war period, the Avignon Festival was the spearhead of the French theatrical revival, with a strong emphasis on provincial theaters.

Olivier Py, however, expressed his concern about the gradual withdrawal of the State from the principle of decentralization, calling for more support for the Festival.

"We must restore the margin of maneuver to the decentralization, not the Parisian theater, "he told AFP, regretting that" local authorities are divesting, because they have experienced decreases in staffing "of the government.

"All these shows that will play in Paris and make the life of the French theater, they really speak the language," he says.

Parallel to the "in", there is the "Avignon off ", with more than 1,500 shows that try every year to be noticed despite the lack of resources.

The" off "will see the adaptation of two literary successes on stage:" French Suite "of Irene Nemirovsky and" The Erotic potential of my wife "by David Foenkinos