July in Avignon, watching Belgian weirdo Jan Fabre, the festival’s designated madman-in-residence, make his performers roll around in their own sweat while reciting what I can only assume was poetry, though my French was drowning after the third pastis. The whole goddamn city had become one sprawling theatrical acid trip, and I was here for it, even if I had no fucking clue what I was looking for.
I was a graduate student. PhD in theater directing. I was trying to reconcile academic horseshit about “legible arguments” with the messy, sweaty, totally irrational reality of what actually happens when people get on stage and do things. Before the PhD grind, I’d worked with Mabou Mines, hauling cables, rebuilding sets in a black box theater in PS 122 that smelled like rats and incense, taking shows to festivals where the “dressing room” was a medieval closet with electrical wiring that looked like a suicide pact. I knew what it meant when a projector died five minutes before curtain. I’d been on the other side of the curtain. But Avignon wasn’t that. Avignon was full possession, demonic and unapologetic.
Here’s the thing about the Avignon Festival: it doesn’t give a shit what you think. It doesn’t need your approval or your understanding. This isn’t Broadway, it’s not even off-off-Broadway. This is theater as fever dream, as dare, as near-religious mania. Fabre had packed the 2005 program with what the directors pretentiously called “poets of the scene,” which apparently meant artists too deranged to stay in their lane. Dancers sculpted. Actors painted. Musicians crawled across stone floors covered in what might have been ash or might have been cocaine… at this point, who the hell knew. Boundaries between disciplines evaporated like cheap wine spilled on hot pavement.
And speaking of wine… Jesus Christ, the wine. You’re in the Rhône Valley, surrounded by some of the best on the planet, and nobody’s being precious about it. Nobody’s swirling and discussing “notes of black cherry.” You drink because you need fuel for the arguments you’re about to have at 2 AM about whether that last show was genius or complete bullshit.
I was sleeping on my friend’s floor. The bathroom was so small you had to step into the hallway to wipe. But it was cheap and you could stumble home at 4 AM without dying. We’d wake up destroyed, make terrible coffee that tasted like punishment, and try to piece together what the hell we’d witnessed the night before and why it felt like we’d barely survived.
The rhythm was brutal. You’d crawl to a café mid-morning, mainline espresso and Marlboros while plotting your cultural assault for the day, then disappear for the afternoon because July in Provence isn’t weather, it’s a weapon. Only tourists and the clinically insane try to function at noon. We’d escape to some crumbling house outside the walls with a pool that was more algae than water. Nobody cared. We’d float for hours drinking rosé from bottles with handwritten labels, wine made by somebody’s cousin in a barn somewhere.
Beautiful, exhausted artists—dancers, actors, directors—would lounge at the pool’s edge, smoking, arguing about whether the body mattered more than language or whether words still had a fighting chance. One actor, Anne?, had performed the night before in some piece about desire and death that involved a lot of nudity, what looked like motor oil, and chanting that may or may not have been Yiddish. Now, wrapped in a towel by the pool, she was explaining her artistic process with total sincerity. I had no idea what she was talking about. But I believed her.
Evening meant diving back into the medieval labyrinth. Shows erupted from churches, basements, rooftops, random courtyards. Bodies twisted in ways that made me feel every cigarette I’d ever smoked, every bad decision, every late night. The city didn’t just host theater—it became theater, an entire urban organism hijacked by performance.
And then, somewhere in the chaos, I saw the real shit.
Josef Nadj, this Hungarian-French choreographer who makes bodies move like haunted architecture. Ancient. Carved. He and his dancers don’t perform; they channel something older than language. Watching him, I felt the floor drop out: entire histories of gesture compressed into a single trembling hand. It was the kind of thing that makes you realize you don’t know a goddamn thing.
Romeo Castellucci destroyed whatever boundaries I still believed in. His stage pictures were apocalyptic and devotional at once. Castellucci doesn’t make theater; he makes visions. Religious visions for a godless century. I walked out of his all three of his shows shaking, unsure if I’d seen art or had a stroke.
And Marina Abramović. Fuck. The high priestess of making you uncomfortable. Her piece didn’t “perform” anything…it demanded something from you, some kind of ethical attention that felt invasive and absolutely necessary. She made staring feel like being interrogated by a deity you didn’t believe in but suddenly feared. It was the first time I understood that endurance wasn’t spectacle…it was communion.
After those encounters, even Fabre’s sweat rituals made sense. Not logical sense, but bodily sense. These artists weren’t offering meaning. They were offering thresholds. Portals to something you couldn’t name but recognized.
Between shows I’d post up at a café, slam espressos, listen to theater kids argue about Artaud in French like they could resurrect him through cigarette smoke and sheer pretension. The Palais des Papes loomed over everything, this monument to medieval corruption turned into a stage for avant-garde heresy. The irony was obscene and perfect.
The Off festival added its own insanity: fifteen hundred shows crammed into every doorway, attic, and alleyway. Actors pushed flyers with manic, end-times smiles. Street performers colonized every plaza. Every stone wall was a potential stage. It was overwhelming, occasionally unbearable, but relentlessly, defiantly alive.
Timeless Capitalism: Avignon Theatre Festival, 2005
Late nights ended at this wine bar near the Place de l’Horloge, packed with actors, directors, clowns (the non creepy type), and true believers. The owner would pull out dusty bottles from his personal stash. Gigondas, Vacqueyras… Wines that tasted like secrets whispered directly into your bloodstream. We’d drink, smoke, argue, confess things we’d regret, contradict ourselves, then stumble back to that floor we’d claimed as home.
The theater itself? Unrelenting. Exhausting. Sometimes transcendent.
Sometimes absolute garbage. Usually both at once.
But somewhere between Nadj’s carved bodies, Castellucci’s annihilating images, Abramović’s charged stillness, Fabre’s sweat-slick provocations, and that green pool full of half-baked theories and beautiful people arguing about nothing and everything, somewhere in all that chaos, I understood something my graduate seminars and years touring with Mabou Mines had prepared me for but never quite named:
Performance isn’t about clarity. It’s about bodies insisting, against heat, exhaustion, self-doubt, and the sheer absurdity of it all, that meaning still flickers somewhere between the gesture and the witness. That the attempt still matters, even when it fails.
Especially when it fails.
When July finally ended and everyone scattered back to their regular lives, I was sunburned, broke, possibly damaged, and certain of only this:
Art doesn’t exist to explain the world.
Art exists because bodies refuse to shut the fuck up, even when drowning in images, noise, and the general soul-crushing machinery of modern life.