Latest news with #PaulClaudel
LeMonde
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- LeMonde
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%.
LeMonde
23-05-2025
- Science
- LeMonde
How the rose sculpts its delicate corolla
"To know the rose, someone uses geometry and another uses the butterfly," wrote Paul Claudel in L'Oiseau noir dans le soleil levant (The Black Bird in the Rising Sun, 1927). In other words, in botany as elsewhere, it all depends on your point of view. The perspective of the geometer – less whimsical but more methodical – is clearly the one that has been chosen by the laboratory that described, in the May 1 issue of Nature, how the petals of this floral jewel form. This May, rose lovers can see it for themselves: in its youthful prime, the rose displays petals with smooth, curved edges. But as the flower unfurls the folds of its purple (or white, yellow or red) dress, its petals undergo a surprising metamorphosis. They take on a polygonal shape with sharp points, called "cusps," whose number and definition increase as the rose matures.
