Site Specific Art at The Avignon Theatre Festival (Festival d’Avignon).
I’m standing in some medieval stone square and the light’s doing that thing where it’s too golden to be real, and there’s a woman in white doing something with her body that shouldn’t be possible, and you think maybe you’ve finally lost it. Maybe that house wine at lunch was actually paint thinner. Maybe you died somewhere between the ramparts and the Rue de la République and this is what comes after.
But no, there’s fifty people watching, and they’re seeing it too. Except they’re not just watching her, because twenty feet to your left there’s a guy screaming Shakespeare or Artaud or his divorce papers, who the hell knows, and behind you someone’s erected an entire puppet cathedral and set it on fire (metaphorically, probably, the French have permits for this stuff), and you realize you can’t take it all in. You literally cannot. Your circuits are fried. You blink and the whole thing shifts, now it’s some Kurosawa fever dream happening on a goddamn carousel, and you’re standing there like a rube with your jaw unhinged, thinking, “Did I just see what I think I saw?”
The photo’s your only witness. Your only proof you didn’t imagine the whole bleeding thing. That it wasn’t just the bad wine and the good sun and the way this place turns your brain inside out until you’re not sure where the performance ends and your own psychosis begins.
This is Avignon. This is every street corner screaming at you that you’re alive and everything matters and nothing matters and LOOK AT THIS RIGHT NOW. You’re drunk on theater. You’re ruined for normal life. And you wouldn’t have it any other way.
I ride earth’s burning carousel.
Day in, day out.
Sylvia Plath