Rumors ran all day yesterday, but the ax fell this morning: after being canceled at the Comédie de Genève due to conflicting working methods, Les Emigrés, the ultimate play by the great director Polish scene Krystian Lupa will not go through Avignon. The director of the festival Tiago Rodrigues has just announced it in a press release. It is not for lack of struggling, of having worked hard, of having sought all possible solutions so that this large fresco, adapted from a story by WG Sebald which deals with Europe, exile and lives irretrievably lost, for want of reception, can be shared with the public. At issue: logistics, deadlines, financial constraints. Lupa’s show wasn’t over. He was missing a week of rehearsals. Yesterday, around midnight, Tiago Rodrigues had not yet thrown in the towel and he was exploring new avenues.
It may seem absurd and surprising, this race against the clock of one of the largest and most renowned festivals in the world in search of a theater in working order that can accommodate, for a handful of days in June, an artistic troupe returned nomadic. It also reveals the structural vulnerability of the Avignon festival, a colossus with feet of clay, which has little leeway in the event of major unforeseen events: its production budget is tiny, and the festival has no space rehearsals apart from his place of residence La Fabrica.
In its press release, the Avignon festival team begins by recalling its “respect for the dignity of all those working to produce an artistic work”.
Nobody wanted the Emigrants not to play in Avignon. And especially not the Comédie de Genève, the main production of this creation with a phenomenal budget whose management, Natacha Koutchoumov and Denis Maillefer, nevertheless decided on Thursday June 1 to interrupt rehearsals and cancel performances due to “overflows” contrary to the values of Swiss theatre. Yesterday, on Swiss television, the co-director defended her choice from any excess: “As the manager of a cultural institution, we have duties towards our employees. … There was a strong break, it is not a whim of seasoned technicians. It’s terrible to cancel and it’s the worst decision on the part of an institution. We can create, we can be extraordinary, but we have to listen to our employees. We do not replace technicians like kleenex.”
Stéphane Braunschweig, from the Odéon theater: “We are in discussion with the main producer of the show”
The time will come to analyze the difficulties and responsibilities. The time will come to understand this decisive moment of change in the conception of work, which undoubtedly goes beyond the artistic sphere alone. In the meantime, the Polish, French-speaking Swiss and French artistic team, bewildered and even very angry, only wants one thing: that the show for which they have invested themselves strongly and with joy exists. Do everything to stop the haemorrhage of performances and that their show is played, as planned, “in a peaceful setting” says the festival press release, first at the Odéon theater which is to host it from January 11 to 4 next February 2024. Everything is still possible. To date, Stéphane Braunschweig at the head of the Odéon theater which co-produces the show to the tune of 80,000 euros cannot however formally assure that the programming will be maintained even if he wishes: “We are in discussion with the main producer of the show, which is the Comédie de Genève… We are looking for solutions so that the teams have additional rehearsal days.And finally, the director of the Odéon specifies that “the theater will set up a serene working environment so that all the teams work in good conditions“. The team of the Avignon festival announces a little awkwardly in the same press release that it seeks to replace the show of Lupa. Applicants are already on the job. It’s not just nature that abhors a vacuum.