The Avignon Festival, in the south of France, has long had an ambivalent relationship with dance.
The monthlong event, founded in 1947, is a European theater mecca where the reputation of directors and actors are made every July, while choreographers have tended to remain on the margins. In recent years, they have frequently been relegated to the festival’s later dates, when many audience members and professionals have already left.
Not this year. For the first time since 2011, dance took center stage on the festival’s biggest night: the opening performance in the monumental Cour d’Honneur, the open-air courtyard of the city’s Papal Palace. And the reaction from the theater-inclined audience was mixed on Saturday: Many looked bewildered, some left midway through, and others stayed long enough to boo as soon as the lights went down — though they were quickly drowned out by applause.
The choreographer for the show was Marlene Monteiro Freitas, from Cape Verde, whose absurdist, carnivalesque work has become a phenomenon of European contemporary dance in recent years. Still, with her Avignon opener, “Nôt,” which means “night” in Cape Verdean Creole, she arguably overpromised.
The production was billed as inspired by “One Thousand and One Nights,” the collection of Middle Eastern tales — a nod, Freitas said in the playbill, to the focus placed on Arabic at this year’s festival. (For the first time, preshow announcements were delivered in Arabic, the second-most-spoken language in France, as well as in French and English.) Yet Freitas is no conventional storyteller, and “Nôt” is more like a loose collage of scenes, with overt references to “One Thousand and One Nights” few and far between.
The style she has honed with her excellent performers relies heavily on stilted, puppetlike movements and clownish mime; for “Nôt,” Freitas has added whimsical full-face masks. Hidden behind, one performer shuffles across the stage, awkwardly cleaning the props. Another goes into the vast auditorium with a chamber pot, which he hand around the audience members while pretending to relieve himself in their laps.
It’s nothing that will shock the Avignon audience — last year, the Spanish performer Angélica Liddell washed her genitals on the same stage — and ultimately, these vignettes only weakened the impact of some otherwise well-crafted scenes.
At her best, Freitas is a master of building collective movement to frenzied heights, and she gives the audience a few such moments in “Nôt.” The most arresting one involves Mariana Tembe, an extraordinary performer who has been a recurring presence in Freitas’ work.
Tembe, who is missing both legs, is first seen behind a mask, with a costume that includes chiffon limbs. At one point, she climbs onto a chair center stage and launches into a fierce interpretation of Stravinsky’s ballet “Les Noces,” a bleak musical interpretation of a Russian peasant wedding with an undercurrent of violence.
Tembe commands the stage, moving her chiffon legs with pointed staccato defiance, folding and unfolding them not unlike the puppets in another Stravinsky ballet, “Petrushka,” while her proud shoulders hint at Russian folk dancing.
There is a hint, there, of “One Thousand and One Nights,” when Scheherazade negotiates her survival against her violent husband, Shahryar, who murders a different bride very night. Such gender-based violence haunts “Nôt”: Elsewhere, performers line up to change bloodied sheets, over and over, and apron-clad dolls make musical instruments out of knives, before pretending to attack each other.
Had there been less down time between the high points, “Nôt” would have had the makings of a landmark opening night. It may not have matched the most electric dance nights at the Cour d’Honneur — including the 1960s breakthrough of the neoclassical choreographer Maurice Béjart, and visits by Pina Bausch — but Freitas deserves to return.
Another choreographer who’s had a star turn on that stage is Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, whose 2011 work at the festival, “Cesena,” was timed to accompany sunrise, with performances starting at 4:30 a.m. This summer, she is back in Avignon at a more reasonable hour, with “Brel,” a tribute to Jacques Brel, one of Belgium’s best-known singer-songwriters.
With his vibrant, popular chansons, Brel is a surprising choice for De Keersmaeker, 65, a Belgian best-known for her cerebral interpretations of classical and minimalist scores. Yet she has been experimenting anew of late, spurred perhaps by unrest at her company, Rosas: Last year, she was accused of bullying and body-shaming employees.
For “Brel,” she shares the spotlight with Solal Mariotte, a 24-year-old Rosas member. Mariotte, who got his initial training in breaking, broke through with a mercurial starring role in De Keersmaeker’s 2023 “Exit Above (After The Tempest),” which also premiered at Avignon.
Co-signing a creation with one of the world’s most famous contemporary choreographers is quite a leap, and initially, Mariotte’s attitude in “Brel” is reverential. De Keersmaeker dances the first few songs alone, with her much younger partner shouting a few Brel lines from a higher point in the Boulbon quarry, where the show is staged. When he joins her onstage, he slips into her trademark moves, like pared-down turns with arms outstretched.
Yet Brel’s music brings more drama out of De Keersmaeker than expected. Typically a reticent, serious presence, she breaks out into smiles and grimaces at several points. To “Ne Me Quitte Pas” (“Don’t Leave Me”), a 1959 breakup song that many French speakers will recognize from its first piano notes, De Keersmaeker even taps into a rare vulnerability — her knees buckling to the title line before she strips naked and sways slowly, a video of Brel singing projected over her body.
Mariotte finds his footing in the second half of the show, with loose, supple backspins and handstands. In one song, “Amsterdam,” De Keersmaeker even lets loose and follows him to the floor, then links arms with him like an old comrade.
Other scenes play out like a reminiscence of a younger love: Throughout “La Chanson Des Vieux Amants” (“The Old Lovers’ Song”), she remains at the back of the stage, only occasionally looking over at his flurry of steps in the foreground. Yet her stillness is what draws the eye, like a silent acknowledgment of time gone by.
For all his virtuosity, Mariotte still has a ways to go to match her presence, and “Brel” could have used a little editing, but this intergenerational duo is certainly intriguing. De Keersmaeker is passing the Avignon baton to the next generation of choreographers.
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