On a Saturday evening last month, an adventurous audience made its way to a remote venue in the Parisian suburb of Montreuil. Inside Les Chaudronneries, an event space in a disused factory from the 1920s, the Zimbabwean-born choreographer Nora Chipaumire presented her latest work, “Dambudzo,” an interdisciplinary show in which movement, music and sculpture fused with the industrial surroundings.
Throughout the evening, the audience followed Chipaumire and her eight performers around the cavernous space, effectively becoming part of the installation along with them. This performance of “Dambudzo” was the ceremonial opening of this year’s Festival d’Automne (Autumn Festival), which has become one of the signal events in Paris’s cultural calendar since its first edition, in 1972.
Visitors to Art Basel Paris can experience this multidisciplinary festival, which goes until late December and features 84 events spread over 60 venues, throughout Paris and its environs. Encompassing theater, dance, music, visual art and performance, it has an encyclopedic scope that arguably makes it unique in France.
Chipaumire’s production reflected a recent and increasing shift away from a Eurocentric focus on the arts at the festival. This year’s program does feature new and recent work from some of the continent’s most visible artists, among them Robert Wilson, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Romeo Castellucci. But the lineup also includes performances by artists from Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia.
There’s a focus on the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, including a complete retrospective and a virtual reality exhibition at the Pompidou Center, along with a video installation at the Atelier Brancusi. This year’s festival also shines a spotlight on the influential Lebanese theater-making duo Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué, whose politically urgent and formally inventive work often blurs the line between fact and fiction.
During Art Basel Paris, Oct. 18-20, visitors can catch the French premiere of the play “Borborygmus,” Majdalanie and Mroué’s collaboration with the Lebanese artist and musician Mazen Kerbaj, which is described as “a performance about life, death and the digestive system.” That same weekend, there are over a dozen other events at the festival to choose from, including “Parallax,” Kata Weber’s drama about post-Shoah trauma staged by the Hungarian stage and film director Kornel Mundruczo and his theater company, Proton, and “One Thousand and One Nights,” an opera by the Iranian choreographer Sorour Darabi that puts a transgender twist on Scheherazade’s famous tales.
The festival’s artistic director, Francesca Corona, said the festival used most of its budget of 5.5 million euros (roughly $6 million) to co-produce 70 percent to 80 percent of the works featured on its program. Her office, across the street from the Louvre, is festooned with posters from past editions of the festival, including one from the 1970s designed by Joan Miró and a more recent placard with a photograph by Nan Goldin.
“The first desire was really: Let’s open the doors of this city and to welcome artists from all over the world,” Corona said, invoking the spirit of the festival’s founding director, Michel Guy. As an event “born and developed in a big multicultural city,” Corona said, the festival has always been intimately and intricately connected to the “geography and complexity of a big metropolitan territory.”
She maintained that the festival’s “nomadic” character, defined by lack of a central performing venue, is one of its greatest strengths since it requires frequent collaboration with numerous institutions in and around Paris to make it all work.
The result, she said, is a “radically international” program that attracts roughly 170,000 spectators annually. Corona, who arrived to lead the festival in 2022, added that it has seen a spike in new attendees. “In two editions, we had 30% of the audience who came to the festival for the first time,” she said. Low admission prices — the top seats at many shows are under €30 and the festival offers tickets for €8 to students and people under 30 — help make the festival’s eclectic programming accessible to a diverse public.
Contemporary music has also been a major part of the festival’s identity since its beginnings. This year’s program includes works by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Heiner Goebbels, along with Castellucci’s grim staging of Mahler’s Second Symphony and the opera “Picture a day like this,” by George Benjamin and Martin Crimp. It is the last season planned by Joséphine Markovits, one of the festival’s early leaders and a longtime director of its musical program.
Markovits, who died in April at 77, nurtured generations of composers and musicians through her role. (The Italian composer Clara Iannotta, to whom a program is dedicated this year, has been appointed as Markovits’s successor.)
“She really innately understood me as an artist,” said Philip Venables, a British composer to whom Markovits devoted a composer portrait in 2021. Venables, who also participated in the 2022 festival, said the way she promoted and believed in his music “really grounded a lot of interest in my work in Paris and relationship with the festival, which continues even though she’s passed away.”
Noting that the program was broad enough to include both big touring shows as well as lesser-known artists, Venables appreciated what he called the “zeitgeisty avant-gardism” of the festival. “There is a feeling that everything is quite fresh,” he said.
He said that largely had to do with how the festival stayed faithful to creators and performers, a quality that defined Markovits’s many decades of work there.
“They’ve had relationships with particular artists who keep coming back and bringing pieces to the festival,” Venables said. “And you see the growth of their career over that time and their practice, and I think that’s really an important part of the way that the festival is programmed.”
The post The Festival d’Automne Turns All of Paris Into a Stage appeared first on New York Times.
