Fathers, sons and ghosts echo on the stage in Avignon

The streets are lined with posters advertising hundreds of shows. In Avignon, a city in southern France that triples its population during the Theater Festival, the terraces are never empty, and conversation is always interrupted by someone insisting on "selling" their show.

Independent artists are multiplying in their performances right there on the street. Others are drawing attention to what's on display on the stages of small theaters that are springing up like mushrooms throughout the city, with plays at all hours of the day.

In the case of the Avignon Festival, now in its 79th edition and with Portuguese Tiago Rodrigues as artistic director, tickets for shows have long since sold out. Almost all performances are sold out, leading to endless lines for last-minute tickets. Things are back to normal, and there's even a large board displaying tickets and loose notes: "Selling tickets for show x on day y" or "Exchange for day z." What no one wants is to miss the shows that we'll only be able to see on major European stages in months, if not years.

Amidst this artistic hustle and bustle, a festival is taking place alongside it. Called OFF, it was created in response to the official festival, and this year it highlights the Portuguese language, with Brazil as the guest country.

One late afternoon, two dozen people sit on the ground in Place de la Principale. They listen to a man dressed in a full Bahian costume prepare pasta. The table is set, and Gilberto Gil's "Pai e Mãe" (Pai and Mãe) is playing, a 1975 song that reflects a revolution in male behavior. "I spent a lot of time/ Learning to kiss other men/ Like I kiss my father."

A woman's hands translate the speech into sign language, a reflection on contemporary dance ("Most of the time it's without clothes. Everyone's naked"), racism ("It says a lot about our skin. But our skin also says a lot"), and colonialism ("Before the invasion, there were people. Where are those people? It's this other conversation that, if we stay here, will go far"). But it is, above all, a story of an artist, the Brazilian performer Fábio Osório Monteiro.

Trying to cope with the financial challenges of life as an artist, she decided to become a Bahian acarajé vendor and set up her stand there, preparing the dough and frying the dumplings, and interweaving Afro-Brazilian myths with autobiographical elements. In the performance "Bola de Fogo" (Ball of Fire ), she tells her own story, including the moment when, as a Black man from the Northeast, he faced his father to assert his sexuality with courage and truth.

The acarajé served at the end of the performance was just a taste of what we would find at the Avignon Festival, where family ties would be revealed as a recurring theme of the event.

In a deeply political edition, with Arabic as the guest language, the Middle East war as a backdrop, the stalemate in the Ukraine war, Trump's reelection, Macronism in decline, and the far-right rising across Europe, the creators responded not with pamphlets, but with their inner selves. They turned to the interiors of homes, to family ties, to the fractures that always begin nearby but resonate far away. As if, faced with the collapse of the world, the urgent need to first understand what's happening at the table, between parents and children, between inherited silences and cursed affections.

Mario Banushi is a 26-year-old Albanian artist, largely unknown to the general public, yet considered one of the festival's revelations. "Mami ," his debut performance in Avignon, is a wordless piece that reveals a woman with a thousand faces, a tribute to the women he grew up with: first his grandmother, to whom he was entrusted until he was 13, and then his mother. By asking who, ultimately, is caring for whom, Banushi develops a visual poem, a landscape of memories through which the performers move to confront their own memories.

Tiago Rodrigues , the festival's artistic director, also showcased his latest creation. "La Distance" is also a play about family, specifically the relationship between a father and daughter in 2077. He survives on Earth, nearly reduced to nothing by global warming; she moves to Mars, ready to start over from scratch. Distance imposes noise on communication, lengthens silences, and blurs memories. Here, too, dystopias are projected that are disturbingly close, staged with a realism that hits the audience like a punch in the gut. The play will premiere in Portugal next year.

Tiago Rodrigues: “When we invent stories of a pessimistic future, we really want to be wrong”

Thomas Ostermeier's new work, presented at the Avignon Opera, based on Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck , was also highly acclaimed. The Norwegian playwright's classic, written in 1884, is one of his most enigmatic and dark works—a family drama where the truth, far from redeeming, destroys. It is a bitter meditation on self-deception as a survival mechanism. Known for his raw and visceral aesthetic, Ostermeier, a key figure in contemporary European theater and artistic director of the Schaubühne in Berlin since 1999, finds fertile ground here to explore the boundaries between honesty and cruelty, between revelation and ruin. The staging shifts the text to a contemporary atmosphere. The soundtrack, punctuated by Metallica and Led Zeppelin, amplifies the tragic tone and the growing tension on stage. Ostermeier doesn't sugarcoat it. It gets to the heart of the play and shows how, sometimes, the truth is too unbearable to be told in a family setting — and even more so to be lived.

And if there were any doubts that the true core of this year's Avignon Festival was family and its bonds, fractures, and ghosts, no piece made this more evident than Israel & Mohamed , one of the highlights of this 79th edition (with no release date yet for Portugal). In this singular creation, Spanish choreographer and performer Israel Galván joins forces with French-Moroccan artist and director Mohamed El Khatib to create a documentary dance where the personal and the political intertwine in a moving way.

Transforming their bodies into living archives, Galván and El Khatib work on the subject of memory, heritage, and identity, under the shadow of their father figures. At the center is the encounter between the two artists and their intimate, family, and professional stories, shared on stage with disarming directness. Under the gaze of their own parents, they search for a common language rooted in the body, in its marks, in its scars.

The piece eschews choreography in the traditional sense: dance, flamenco, is a language of survival and archaeology of the self. With plenty of humor and a restrained melancholy, Israel & Mohamed proposes a meditation on masculinity, legacy, exile, and the difficulty of transmission. There is no catharsis, but there is beauty: in the fragility, in the searching, and in the listening between two men who, in different ways, inherited silences—and transform them into movement.

The Observer traveled at the invitation of the Belém Cultural Center, Culturgest and the Porto Municipal Theater