4 days ago
Avignon Festival 2025: An edition marked by emotion and fragility
The image was sublime: a red satin high heel rising into the night, disappearing into skies as vast as those in Le Soulier de satin ("The Satin Slipper"), by Paul Claudel. There were many similarly powerful emotions during the 2025 edition of the Avignon Festival, the 79 th, which closes on Saturday, July 26. A biblical downpour on the Cour d'Honneur of the Palais des Papes. A Brazilian song that wrung the heart, "Sonhos" by Caetano Veloso, to express a father's love for his daughter. The words of Mahmoud Darwish or those of Gisèle Pelicot, both delivered with the same dignity, ringing out in the night, speaking to the endless disasters of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the culture of sexual violence.
These emotions experienced under the Avignon stars in southern France emerged from a festival that, overall, leaves a slight feeling of disappointment, especially regarding the dance program, which accounted for around a third of this year's schedule, and the shows presented in the context of the festival's featured language, Arabic. That did not stop the 2025 edition from breaking attendance records, with an unprecedented fill rate exceeding 98%.
