Tiago Rodrigues at the Avignon Festival, in June 2024. CLÉMENT MAHOUDEAU/AFP
Tiago Rodrigues does not want to orient the Avignon Festival toward the past, but to launch it into the future. His plans include supporting creative freedom, bringing theater back to the Court of Honor of Avignon's Papal Palace, celebrating Jean Vilar as a reformer, and welcoming a wave of young artists. The playwright and director, known for deeply human productions such as Sopro and Antony and Cleopatra, does nothing by halves. He left Lisbon to establish himself in the southern French city of Avignon. In this new chapter of his life, he will even vote in France in 2026, for the very first time.
What will be the main priorities of your second term as director of the festival?
Being renewed gives me the opportunity to approach the festival based on the experience of my first three years, while projecting myself into the next five. The project has taken root. It has adapted to the festival's realities, means, tools and expertise. The questions that run through Avignon are, by and large, always the same. Yet the one that is closest to my heart is creative freedom. How can we defend it at a time when it is under threat everywhere in the world, and especially in Europe? How can we make this creative work ever more accessible to the broadest possible audience? This mission, which has been the festival's ever since it was founded by Jean Vilar (1912-1971) in 1947, has lost none of its relevance today.
