As a punishing heat wave swept through Europe last week, some cultural events had to carry on with the show. The Avignon Festival, one of Europe’s largest theater extravaganzas, was just days from opening. And even as temperatures hit 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit, the festival’s venues — many of them outdoors — still needed to be prepped.
“Within 12 hours, we had adapted,” said Eve Lombart, who has been the festival’s general administrator since 2019. Working hours for technicians building stages and sets were adjusted, with longer breaks in the afternoon; to compensate, technical teams started as early as 6 a.m. at some of the event’s 40 venues.
The swift adjustments were the result, Lombart said, of years of behind-the-scenes effort to adapt the festival to climate change.
For Avignon and other events in the south of France, rising summer temperatures have become an existential threat. Days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit are no longer a rarity, with serious effects on audiences and workers. While air conditioning — less common in Europe than in other parts of the world — has been installed at most indoor venues, crowds typically walk from show to show throughout the day to catch as many productions as possible.
Florent Masse, a Princeton University professor who is the director of the Princeton French Theater Festival, said that conditions had worsened significantly since he first traveled to Avignon, in 2002. Masse noted that on the opening day of this year’s event, the 30-minute walk back to the city center after a performance at La Fabrica, a venue in Avignon’s suburbs, was arduous.
“I can bear it,” he said, “but for someone older or with health issues, it’s going to be difficult.”
Bringing in practical solutions and reducing the event’s carbon footprint were at the top of the priority list for the Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues when he was appointed as the festival’s director, in 2021. “Because of Avignon’s importance, history and visibility, we have a responsibility to act and to be accountable,” he said in a phone interview last week. “We’re far beyond making great speeches.”
Recent changes include a ban on performances from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., the hottest hours of the day. Rodrigues also set a new rule for international artists, who have long played a significant role in Avignon’s lineups: “If you’re coming from overseas, you have to have other touring dates, either in France or in Europe,” he said, to share the carbon footprint from air travel.
Last year, for example, the festival looked far and wide for partner venues to justify a visit by the Brazilian team of director Carolina Bianchi, who became an overnight sensation with “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella.” “Carolina was quite unknown, so we had to battle for months to create a tour,” Rodrigues said. “Once we’re passionate about an overseas artist, we work to convince others.”
Rodrigues said initiatives like these had wide support across the French culture sector. The Avignon Festival started tracking its carbon footprint in 2010, and a dedicated internal committee meets to discuss sustainability measures every month. Starting in 2014, it also banded together with a group of other cultural events in the south of France to respond more effectively to global warming. The collective they founded, COFEES, now has 43 member organizations across the region.
All have specific concerns. Some events, like the flagship opera festival in Aix-en-Provence, have moved to better recycle and reuse sets for in-house productions. A book festival is working to limit the pulping of books, once a common practice for large volumes of unsold copies.
But some issues are the same across festivals. According to a 2021 report by the Shift Project, a French environmental think tank, eliminating meat and switching to local and vegetarian food offerings could reduce the carbon footprint of a festival’s catering by 90 percent. Céline Guingand, the administrator of COFEES, said that events were working toward this but often had limited power to change it. It would take “dialogue with outside contractors, like food trucks, because they have their own habits,” she said.
The biggest carbon culprit is also beyond administrators’ direct control: audience travel, which accounts for over 80 percent of the Avignon Festival’s footprint.
Around a third of the event’s audiences live locally and drive to performances, which creates significantly more carbon emissions than taking the bus or train.
Yet public transportation, which is run by the local authorities, is organized around school and working hours, limiting the options of festivalgoers during the summer. To push for change, the festival teamed up with Avignon’s other festival: Le Off, the open-access Fringe that runs concurrently, bringing every corner of the city to life each July.
Last year, it worked: The region added late-night trains to neighboring cities, like Arles and Carpentras, so that audience members could get home after shows without driving. The two festivals also collaborated on an initiative to move theater sets by train rather than using trucks.
For Le Off, such measures are made more difficult by the event’s sprawling nature: Over 1,700 productions are being presented around the city this month, at almost 140 venues, each with its own management.
Yet the umbrella association AF&C, which oversees Le Off, has found ways to incentivize action. Reducing waste has been a key goal, since the city is covered every summer with promotional posters and the fliers that artists hand out to visitors soon build up as litter in the streets. AF&C now offers eco-friendly printing deals via a partner that uses recycled paper and vegetal ink.
Marie-Claire Neveu, an actor-writer who is also in charge of environmental issues on the board of AF&C, said that when she first took part in Le Off, in 2016, she was told she needed to print “at least 20,000 to 25,000 fliers” to promote her show. Now, the upper limit set by AF&C is 5,000, she added.
Neveu still wonders, however, about the long-term viability of giant festivals like those in Avignon. Some environmental specialists are calling for smaller, more local events, and a handful of organizations have gone down this route: Panoramas, an electronic music festival in the Brittany region of northern France, opted in 2023 to highlight local talent and decrease its audience capacity by around 50 percent.
Yet voluntarily limiting an event’s size remains “somewhat taboo,” Guingand said.
Every summer, there are also joking suggestions among Avignon’s regulars, as they line up for tickets under the scorching sun, about relocating the theater juggernaut to cooler climes. But Rodrigues said that wasn’t an option.
“I heard rumors that some cities up north in Europe wish to be the new Avignon,” he said. “I invite them to be the new themselves — because you cannot replace the spirit of Avignon.”
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