Reviewed by:

• 76th Festival D’avignon
• Ljubiša Matić

After the collective trauma that made the live (co-) presence of people in public irrelevant, or even dangerous, the breath of a certain freedom soared afresh along the ramparts of Avignon. The longest-running theatre festival in France was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and then returned in 2021 with strict “social distancing” measures in place, which brought forth an atmosphere of crowd management, surveillance, and insecurity. In July 2022, those restrictions were rescinded, which allowed the Festival to once more pervade the one-half-square-mile within the fortifications of the former City of Popes that houses upward of two hundred performing venues. Given that theatre attendance in France had plummeted by as much as thirty percent compared to pre-COVID times, theatre companies were eager to embrace the Avignon festival as a way to revitalize attendance at live art events.

By dehierarchizing and depersonalizing dramatis personae, as well as assembling them as choruses and in chorus-like configurations, several festival productions reflected on the tensions surrounding contemporary collectivism. Specificall, the festival spoke to lingering tensions regarding governmental policies enacted during the pandemic in the name of collective values and public health, which were perceived by some members of the public as examples of latent authoritarianism. As if to suggest ways out of this impasse, the choral formations, as well as the dehierarchization of dramatic character, necessitated performers’ multidisciplinary versatility and volatility, hinting at an artistic ambivalence that elided overt contestations between the state and the individual.

After Russian authorities disbanded his Moscow theatre, the popular Gogol Center, Kirill Serebrennikov became the first Russian artist to have the honor of opening the Avignon festivities with a premiere at the Palais des Papes. Although the director had long been considered an opponent of Vladimir Putin’s politics, and since 2021 an antiwar spokesman to boot, he was chosen as the festival’s drawing card long before the February 2022 onset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By the same token, his conceptualization of the play The Black Monk (The Чёрный Mönch)—co-produced by the Gogol Center, Hamburg’s Thalia Theater, and, as rumor had it, Russian tycoons who defected to Berlin—predated the war’s outbreak. The mixed critical reception of the show, which had attracted considerable attention from festivalgoers, was due partly to the audience’s inflated expectations as well as to the artistic team’s unfulfilled ambitions.

Heavenly bodies as the archetype of the chorus in The Black Monk. (Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage.)

The Black Monk is based on a meditative, intimist novella by Anton Chekhov that explores questions of insanity and delusions of grandeur. Serebrennikov [End Page 102] elevated his source text into a Gesamtkunstwerk that felt even more grandiose for having been staged under the imposing walls of the Court of Honor, which seats 2,500 spectators. Four distinct sections of the play allowed the spectators to linger over the perspectives of central characters: an overworked young intellectual Kovrin, who is haunted by hallucinations of a black-robed monk convincing him he is chosen by God for his genius to save mankind from millennia of suffering; his foster father, who offers him refuge at the countryside estate with breathtaking gardens where he grew up; his wife, who is compelled to cajole him into undergoing treatment, after which he regains mental health but loses joy in life and thus starts missing conversations with the monk; and the apparition itself, brought back one last time by Kovrin’s own remorse for ruining his family, in an encounter that leads to his death—with his face frozen in a blissful smile.

“Crammed together into a rectangle in the middle of the stage” in Solitaire. (Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage.)

To develop an aesthetic that would intimidate the spectators by penetrating the mechanisms of madness, the dissident director went beyond intensifying Kovrin’s frenzy and aggressiveness. In the production, which largely adhered to the...

 审阅者：

•  第76届阿维尼翁音乐节
•  柳比萨·马蒂奇

在集体创伤使人们在公共场合的现场（共同）存在变得无关紧要，甚至危险之后，某种自由的气息重新沿着阿维尼翁的城墙蔓延。法国举办时间最长的戏剧节于 2020 年因新冠肺炎 (COVID-19) 大流行而取消，并于 2021 年回归，并采取了严格的“社交距离”措施，带来了人群管理、监视和不安全的氛围。 2022 年 7 月，这些限制被取消，音乐节得以再次在前教皇城防御工事内的半平方英里范围内举办，该城内设有超过 200 个表演场地。鉴于法国剧院的上座率与新冠疫情爆发前相比下降了百分之三十，剧院公司迫切希望通过阿维尼翁艺术节来重振现场艺术活动的观众人数。

通过对戏剧人物进行去等级化和非个性化，以及将它们组合成合唱团和类似合唱团的结构，一些节日作品反映了围绕当代集体主义的紧张局势。具体来说，这个节日谈到了大流行期间政府以集体价值观和公共卫生的名义制定的政策所带来的挥之不去的紧张局势，一些公众认为这些政策是潜在威权主义的例子。仿佛是为了提出摆脱这种僵局的出路，合唱团的编队以及戏剧人物的去等级化，需要表演者的多学科多才多艺和多变性，暗示着一种艺术上的矛盾心理，消除了国家与个人之间的公开争论。

俄罗斯当局解散了他在莫斯科的剧院、广受欢迎的果戈理中心后，基里尔·谢列布连尼科夫成为第一位有幸在教皇宫首演为阿维尼翁庆祝活动拉开帷幕的俄罗斯艺术家。尽管这位导演长期以来一直被认为是弗拉基米尔·普京政治的反对者，并且自 2021 年以来一直是反战发言人，但早在 2022 年 2 月俄罗斯入侵乌克兰之前，他就被选为电影节的招牌。出于同样的原因，他对戏剧《黑和尚》（The Чёрный Mönch）的概念化——由果戈里中心、汉堡塔利亚剧院以及传闻中叛逃到柏林的俄罗斯大亨联合制作——早于战争爆发。这场演出引起了节日观众的极大关注，其评价褒贬不一，部分原因是观众的期望过高，以及艺术团队未实现的抱负。

《黑和尚》中合唱团的原型是天体。 （照片：Christophe Raynaud de Lage。）

《黑和尚》改编自安东·契诃夫的一部冥想、亲密的中篇小说，探讨了精神错乱和宏伟妄想的问题。 Serebrennikov [完第 102 页] 将他的源文本提升为 Gesamtkunstwerk，由于在可容纳 2,500 名观众的荣誉法庭雄伟的围墙下上演，感觉更加宏伟。该剧的四个不同部分让观众在中心人物的视角中流连忘返：劳累过度的年轻知识分子科夫林，被一个黑袍僧人的幻觉所困扰，他相信自己是上帝选中的天才，可以拯救人类免于千年之灾。的痛苦；他的养父为他提供了庇护所，让他住在他长大的乡村庄园，那里有令人惊叹的花园；他的妻子被迫哄他接受治疗，治疗后他的精神恢复了健康，但失去了生活的乐趣，并开始错过与和尚的对话；以及幽灵本身，由于科夫林对破坏家庭的悔恨，在一次导致他死亡的遭遇中最后一次被带回来——他的脸上冻结着幸福的微笑。

《纸牌》中“在舞台中央挤成一个矩形”。 （照片：Christophe Raynaud de Lage。）

为了发展出一种通过穿透疯狂机制来恐吓观众的美学，这位持不同政见的导演不仅仅强化了科夫林的疯狂和攻击性。在制作过程中，很大程度上遵循了...