History

For 17 years, the Festival reflected the work of one man, one team, one location and thus was the embodiment of one spirit. Jean Vilar's aim was to attract a young captivated and fresh audience, through a type of theatre that was different from what could be seen in Paris at that time.
He wanted to "renew theatre and collective forms of art by providing a more open space (...) to give a breath of fresh air to an art form that's stifling in waiting rooms, in cellars, in salons; to reconcile architecture with dramatic poetry."

Jean Vilar developed an attachment to the group of actors who performed each July in front of a growing and devoted audience. Gérard Philipe - already a well-known screen actor by that time - became the festival symbol after playing title roles in Corneille's Le Cid and Kleist's The Prince de Hombourg. The Festival spearheaded a rebirth of French theatre. It served as a guiding light and encouraged other theatrical experiments led by "pioneers" of decentralisation such as Jean Daste in Saint Etienne, Maurice Sarrazin in Toulouse, Hubert Grignoux in Rennes or André Clavé in Strasbourg. The theatre was given a new lease of life thanks to the work of directors sent by the state on missions to places then considered as cultural deserts. The Festival d'Avignon became a meeting place for these stage pioneers and at the same time, an expected summer cultural event in France.

It was now clear that the Festival d'Avignon was a permanent fixture on the cultural calendar. It was time for Vilar to have a permanent stage. In 1951, Jeanne Laurent, the director of Performing Arts at the State Fine Arts Secretariat, and who encouraged Vilar in 1947 as well as lent financial support to the "Semaine d'Art" (Art week), had faith in the success of the Festival d'Avignon. She realised that the decentralisation policy in France convinced a large number of people. An interdepartmental committee wanted a report on national theatre; Laurent suggested that the report should focus on popular theatre ; what was possible in the provinces was certainly possible for Paris and its suburbs. The committee was not insensitive to Laurent's determination and approved her idea. That was on the 17th of July 1951. She immediately caught a train to Avignon and asked Vilar to work with her on this project. He hesitated, consulted the members of his group, and finally agreed. On the eve of the funeral for Louis Jouvet - one of France's greatest actors - Vilar was officially appointed director of the theatre of Chaillot in Paris. He renamed it the Théâtre National Populaire. The Avignon crew was the core of the TNP.
Until 1963, the TNP and the Avignon Festival had  one unique "boss" whose work was animated by a post-war cultural militancy aiming at drawing a larger audience.

Many associations, youth movements, work councils and secular friendship groups were thus approached. Thousands of young people descended on the city, sleeping in camp-sites, in guesthouses ; schools were opened to offer them accommodation. The Orchard Urban V became a venue for debates, meetings and readings. Thirteen countries took part in the first International Youth Encounters organised by CEMEA (Centre d'Entraînement aux Méthodes d'Education Active = active methods for education training centre) and by the CEAI (Centre d'Echanges Artistiques Internationaux = International artistic exchanges centre).
The administration and the troupe set up in Paris presented memorable performances of Lorenzaccio, Dom Juan, The Marriage of Figaro, Murder in the Cathedral, Les Caprices de Marianne, Mother Courage and The Trojan War Will Not Take Place.
And every summer, at the Palais des papes, a cultural ritual, a kind of "communion" took place.

In 1980, the Festival reached a turning point in its history. Until then, it had been administered by the City Council and did not receive subsidies from the government. It needed to be made more modern and professional to appeal to a new generation of theatre artists. Paul Puaux handed over the reins of the Festival to a younger administrator, Bernard Faivre d'Arcier, who for five years set out to achieve this end.

Paul Puaux wanted to devote his time to the history of Jean Vilar's challenge and established the Maison Jean Vilar in Avignon.

The Festival won its administrative freedom. The State joined the Festival's board. The organising team was expanded to cope with the requirements of modern management and increasingly sophisticated technology. The device in the Cour d'honneur du Palais des papes was specially modified to welcome the staging of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Richard II by Ariane Mnouchkine's company "Le Théâtre du Soleil".
So the new generation of drama and dance made its grand entrance also with Daniel Mesguish (Le Roi Lear), Jean-Pierre Vincent (les Dernières Nouvelles de la peste by Bernard Chartreux), Georges Lavaudant (Les Céphéïdes by Jean-Christophe Bailly), Jérôme Deschamps (Les Blouses), Manfred Karge and Matthias Langhoff (Chekhov's La Cerisaie, The Prince of Homburg), Philippe Caubère (La Danse du diable), Pina Bausch (Kontakthof, Walzer, Nelken), Jean-Claude Gallotta (Daphnis et Chloé, Yves P), Maguy Marin... etc. The Festival became one of the biggest enterprises in performing arts. It became a symbol of change and each year its poster was designed by a different artist.

Vilar opened the Festival to dance and cinema and to musical theatre. Bernard Faivre d'Arcier opened it to new forms and, in 1984, proposed a confrontational theme in an exhibition and in debates called "real-life and artifice" ("du vivant et de l'artificiel").

In 1985, Alain Crombecque, former artistic director of the Festival d'Automne (Autumn Festival of Paris), took charge of the festival d'Avignon and remained for eight years. His generation in theatre had earned a certain esteem that filtered into the Festival Avignon, and he added his own personal mark. He was insistent on including readings of contemporary poetry (by poets such as Michel Leiris, René Char, Louis-René Des Forêts etc.), about bringing together the public and prominent actors (Alain Cuny, Maria Casarès and Jeanne Moreau for example), about contemporary music with the Centre Acanthes and traditional culture from outside of Europe (African, Indian, Pakistani or Iranian music and performances of the Ramayana by different countries from South Asia).

From the Mahâbhârata staged by Peter Brook at the disused Boulbon Quarry, to the programme of traditions and music from South America, Avignon opened up more to other countries. Nonetheless the Festival retained its status as the focal point of France's biggest theatrical forays, adapted to outsize productions that could not have been staged very easily elsewhere, like the unabridged version of Paul Claudel's Soulier de satin (The Satin Shoe), directed by Antoine Vitez or screenings of landmark silent films accompanied by orchestra in the Cour d'honneur of the Popes Palace such as Intolerance by D.W. Griffith in 1986, and Eisenstein's October in 1989.

In 1993 Bernard Faivre d'Arcier was re-appointed to the Festival with Christiane Bourbonnaud, as administrator, and with a new goal: to make Avignon a hub of European theatre.

The structure was consolidated with a bigger budget, an audience of more than 100,000, about forty productions each summer amounting to more than 300 performances, in about twenty different venues, each one very different from the other.
The Festival remained at the centre of French stage creation with well-known directors like Jacques Lassalle, Didier Bezace, Alain Françon and Stuart Seide, and a new generation represented by Olivier Py, Stanislas Nordey and Éric Lacascade, as well as choreographers such as Angelin Prejlocaj, Mathilde Monnier and Catherine Diverrès. Its doors opened to international works of traditional and contemporary culture from outside of Europe - from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India and South America - as well as to great European artists such as Pina Bausch, Declan Donnellan, Romeo Castellucci and Alain Platel. The Festival also welcomed artists from Central and Eastern European states with the Russian season in 1997 and the creation of Theorem, an association of theatres and festivals seeking to produce and promote young artists from those countries like Oskaras Korsunovas, Grzegorz Jarzyna, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Arpàd Schilling...

In 2003, the Festival was cancelled due to strikes which affected live performances all over France. This crisis was sparked by a change in the rules which govern unemployment benefits specific to entertainment workers in France, and which placed them in a particular vulnerable situation.