At the 2025 Avignon Festival, the shows not to be missed

Lots of dance, theater of course, music, and even a children's show. The official program for the 79th edition of the Avignon festival is dense (42 shows, 32 of which were created in 2025, for 300 performances) and varied. Among the promises: (almost) sure bets, artists who were still unknown yesterday, and a selection of shows rooted in the Arab world, the festival's guest language this year. Because you have to choose, the Libération theater team has put together a personalized program. Are you more of a news junkie or a repertoire addict? Do you want to sing Oum Kalthoum in the main courtyard or never hear a word about this damn planet Earth again? Take your pick.

Can't you just tear off your infusion of current events, dramas, and heated debates all at once? You're in for a treat: this year, perhaps more than ever, the festival is firmly rooted in reality.

It is a dive into the continent of still vibrant archives of the Pelicot trial, in the very city where it took place, from September 2 to December 19. There is no doubt that the theatrical scene and the reading will allow the forty performers of all sexes not only to pay homage to Gisèle Pelicot , but to broaden understanding and identify the blind spots of this trial described as both "out of the ordinary" and exemplary of what patriarchal culture produces .

So, is it possible to live together after a genocide? The show premiered in Rwanda, with some performances taking place in the hills, where the inconceivable, the irreversible, took place. Dida Nibagwire and Frédéric Fisbach chose to adapt Gaël Faye's bestseller, staging it with Rwandan actresses, actors, and musicians, some of whom experienced the genocide, in Kinyarwanda and French. A promise that risks striking the eye and the ear—in short, making us more intelligent.

The world as it is? It's fine, thank you. You want to take a step back.

The daughter is on Mars, the father remained on Earth. It's 2077, and some Earthlings are now refugees on the red planet. How can dialogue be maintained? Relations between boomers and their descendants were already strained, but what remains when they no longer (really) live on the same planet? Festival director Tiago Rodrigues directs actors Adama Diop and Alison Dechamps in this dystopia, shown for the first time in Avignon.

Two cosmonauts are freewheeling in the stratosphere: Boris and Kyril wander around, finding new starry spots like mushroom spots. The actors play with weightlessness by swaying their hips on a stool like they did when they were little, connected to their rocket by vacuum cleaner tubes. Jeanne Candel's Rockets is also a tribute to the beauty of theater. On the infinite stage of space or in the tiny cosmos of theater, it's the same: the great comedy of human ambitions.

And what do we do once we've reached the summit? Do we savor our happiness or do we continue climbing while tripping up others, who also never finish climbing? Do we organize a "summit" with other people stuck in their ivory towers? Do we bring down a reserve of truly pure air reserved exclusively for a privileged few? Or do we commit suicide? It is with this kind of questioning that the Swiss Christoph Marthaler constructs a closed-door meeting between characters who have no intention of understanding each other at all.

Tired of biopics, "powerful women," and other "inspiring personalities"? Come see how an artist is honored at the Avignon Festival.

Let's face it, we weren't expecting Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker to perform in Jacques Brel's shoes. Yet it's on the ultra-popular repertoire (despite its misogyny) of the French-speaking Belgian monument that Solal Mariotte, originally trained in breakdancing and a member of the Rosas company, and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker have chosen to combine their energies and pique our curiosity. Is Brel danceable, really? In the Festival press kit, the choreographer offers a clue: "I'm starting to have some experience with music that isn't necessarily danceable. I like the idea of ​​bringing such music into the body, of not seeing it as something sacred."

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Oum Kalthoum's death, Avignon has partnered with the Printemps de Bourges and the Arab World Institute to bring the Egyptian icon to the stage of the main courtyard of the Palais des Papes. Abdullah Miniawy, Camélia Jordana, Danyl, Maryam Saleh, Natacha Atlas, Rounhaa, and Souad Massi will pay tribute to her.

Listen carefully, many young directors cite François Tanguy as one of their sources of inspiration. Tanguy died on December 7, 2022 at the age of 64. His company, the Théâtre du Radeau, based in Le Mans, is following in his footsteps. It will present Item and Par autan , two of his works among those which continue to spread in contemporary stage creation: a theater-universe, sensory, poetic and open to the world, nourished by strong and luminous images.

Are you taking your French baccalaureate next year or keen to support academics on the verge of Trumpification? Update your classics: here, Paul Claudel is funny and the Arabian Nights are danced.

The director of the Berlin Schaubühne is used to delving into the texts of Ibsen (1828-1906): in Avignon alone, he presented A Doll's House more than twenty years ago and An Enemy of the People in 2012. What will he seek this time in this return to the Norwegian playwright? To observe the ravages of an ideal of purity or the vulnerability of a family and its little secrets?

Le Soulier is back in the main courtyard after its last appearance in 1987! With the Comédie-Française troupe, Eric Ruf magnifies the work of Paul Claudel with large painted canvases sketching seascapes and pictorial skies, and with oversized costumes by Christian Lacroix.

"Not" means night in Cape Verdean. The Cape Verdean choreographer spins a choreography based on the Arabian Nights . Her gestural theatre, funny and horrific, indebted to the most bizarre hours of 20th-century burlesque, has made Marlene Monteiro Freitas a figure of the current scene: she is the "accomplice artist" of this 79th edition of the Festival.

Are the unbelievers the spectators? It is under this beautiful title that Samuel Achache, Sarah Le Picard, Florent Hubert and Antonin-Tri Hoang, a whole gang that we have already met in Sans tambour (Trumpetless), leads us to believe in the miracle as much as to doubt when, on the set, a woman receives a phone call announcing the death of her mother at the very moment she walks through the door, but rejuvenated by several decades. With a 52-piece orchestra in the pit, but also a saxophone, an accordion, percussion and a "mysterious instrument designed to create musical randomness."

The very knowledgeable have already spotted them, but the general public, probably not yet.

We didn't see it coming, and it's already everywhere. Mario Banushi, 26, was born in Albania and grew up in Athens, always surrounded by women—mothers, grandmothers, or near-mothers. The play he's presenting at the Festival, Mami, explores the maternal presence, regardless of who represents it. The young director will also be at the Odéon in Paris next season , with Mami , as well as another play, Goodbye Lindita.

We expect a lot from the new creation of the young dancer and choreographer Némo Flouret, trained at the Conservatoire de Paris and PARTS , and whose last show, 900 Something Days Spent in The XXth Century , vibrant and melancholic, had captivated us. This time, Flouret sets his ten performers in motion around the idea of ​​fireworks, and more precisely the moment of fear and excitement that precedes the first salvo.

The Belgian-Moroccan choreographer, trained in Marrakech, then in Tunisia and at PARTS in Brussels, continues his exploration of Amazigh culture and landscapes. After Atlas / The Mountain seen last year in France , he presents Magec / the Desert in Avignon. He combines a reflection on North African ecosystems and traditions with a conception of stage space structured around mathematical principles.

Does listening to actors sitting on their backs in a chair sound terribly "old theater" to you? These shows are for you.

The Moroccan choreographer who has so beautifully put women on stage (their madness, their bodies and their desire ) will occupy the forecourt of the Palais des Papes (free entry) to have amateur men, residents of Avignon and its surrounding areas, dance to choreographies traditionally reserved for women.

The audience will enter the living room of Raha, a young Afghan woman, sitting on cushions, shoeless. In this performance, a closed-door performance, they will be immersed in Raha's cloistered daily life since the Taliban came to power—through, in particular, a video filmed by an anonymous crew on the streets of Kabul.