The 2020 edition had to be cancelled due to the pandemic. Yesterday at a press conference, its director Olivier Py confirmed that the Festival "in" 2021 would take place, from July 5 to 25. The playwright and director has unveiled the programme for this 75th edition, whose theme leaves one wondering: "Remembering the future"… 
"It will be a nice reopening"
Olivier Py and Françoise Nyssen, former Minister of Culture and President of the Festival d'Avignon, were confident. This year the Festival has a very special political dimension: to restore hope after the chaos. "What man needs most is destiny. […] This is what Culture should be, not a great memorial and nostalgic museum, but the very place of a break-in of the possible. The spectator should be able to applaud a performance by gathering within himself new and prophetic forces. Ideally, we should leave the theatre thinking that tomorrow will be different […] ". Olivier Py.
An ambitious programme
On the program of the Festival d'Avignon this summer: forty-six shows (theater and dance), seventy debates and meetings, forty readings (including actors Omar Sy, Fabrice Luchini and Sandrine Bonnaire, sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin) and two exhibitions, all in about forty places. Most of the shows are creations and the subjects addressed will give pride of place to disasters, sacrifices and dramas, with shows "that respond to the current situation, with utopias, dystopias and post-apocalyptic shows," said Olivier Py.
A feminine and feminist theatre
For the first time in the history of the Festival d'Avignon, almost half of the projects will be led by women, including the iconic Isabelle Huppert who performed Médée in 2000. She will return to the Cour d'honneur of the Palais des Papes with an adaptation of La Cerisaie directed by the Portuguese Tiago Rodrigues. The committed Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy will present a show about a woman fleeing fascism, Between Dog and Wolf, based on the film by Lars von Trier Dogville. Spanish artist Angélica Liddell, a piece about the legendary matador Juan Belmonte, and Belgian Anne-Cécile Vandalem Kingdom, about "a world disappearing and that the youngest will have to reinvent". Frédéric Bélier-Garcia will direct his mother, actress and director Nicole Garcia, in Marie Ndiaye's Royan . The young director Laetitia Guédon will bring Marie Dilasser's text Penthesile·e·s Amazonomachy to the stage. The choice of Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons and female figure of the Trojan War, is not insignificant: "With Marie Dilasser, we are trying to write an oratorio-manifesto for future generations and raise the question of a possible reconciliation."
Openness to the world
The 2021 edition will be under the sign of diversity. The Sicilian Emma Dante will present two creations, Misericordia and Pupo di zucchero ; South African Brett Bailey Samson ; the Hungarian Kornel Mundruczo A Woman in a Piece; Rwandan Dorcy Rugamba and Senegalese Felwine Sarr join forces to propose Liberté, j'aurai habit ton rêve until the last evening (after René Char and Frantz Fanon). The young Palestinian Bashar Murkus The Museum…
An ode to life
A wind of lightness and celebration will blow over the Avignon Festival, including an operetta by Offenbach directed by Victoria Duhamel, 66!, Le ciel, la nuit et la Fête, a seven-hour show featuring Molière, or the celebration of Edgar Morin's hundredth birthday in the Cour d'honneur with a dialogue taking up the Festival's theme, Remembering the Future.
Uncertainties about the health protocol
"There will be 30 more performances, and 20,000 more tickets for sale than usual." If Olivier Py is confident about the holding of the Festival and does not envisage any postponement or cancellation, uncertainty reigns over the health protocol that will be put in place. 131,500 tickets are expected to go on sale unless a tonnage reduction is imposed. Three scenarios are possible: "The first would be a normal gauge and we still have the right to hope so, the second would be a Festival with a reduced gauge and the third, it would be the possibility of a reduced gauge only for closed places". For this edition, the Cour d'honneur has been completely renovated. "We will be ready with a gauge at 50%, 75% or 100%." The future is however much more uncertain for the Festival "Off", which takes place every year in parallel with the "in" and offers some 1500 shows. Its new president, Sébastien Benedetto from Avignon, is less optimistic. The gauge will probably have to be reduced, and the programming has not yet been revealed.
