Presence and Social Space
At the Avignon Festival, every street becomes a stage, every encounter a performance. Between official theater and the theater of life unfolds a multiplicity of social experiences of equal value for those who know how to be present to them.
The plurality of experiences in the festival space
Must we establish hierarchies between different types of social experience in a given space? This question particularly preoccupies me when I observe the Avignon Festival (or any other festival—I take the Avignon Festival as a metonym for all festivals). The spectators present certainly carry an obvious experiential mission: to see shows in this high place of theater. The stated objective is to discover artistic forms, to enrich oneself with new proposals, whether through pure aesthetic interest for the simple spectator, or through professional necessity for the programmer who has come to “shop” for their next season.
Yet reality far exceeds this programmatic framework. Encounters between professionals constitute an equally structuring experience. I think particularly of the “In” bar, that highly select place where only holders of a dearly acquired QR code can enter. The social experience that unfolds there differs radically from the frontal relationship to the spectacle, while remaining crucial for actors in the field. It is there that connections are forged, projects imagined, and the invisible but necessary network for contemporary academic theatrical creation is woven.
Theater beyond the walls: when the city becomes stage
But why limit our gaze to these conventional experiences? The actors of the Off Festival embody a hybrid form of festival existence: they perform their show, certainly, but spend the rest of their day promoting it in public space. Costumed, inhabited by the atmosphere of their creation, they transform the streets into a natural extension of their art.
This observation leads me to a more radical reflection: a person who would simply wander the Avignon streets during the festival, without ever crossing the threshold of a theater, would already live an intense theatrical experience. The promotional parades, the omnipresent posters, the snatches of conversations caught on the fly, the programs abandoned on a bench: everything contributes to creating a theatrical atmosphere that transcends the walls of performance venues.
Moreover, one could decide to focus exclusively on the human relationships that form in this particular context. To observe the ways of being, the dress codes, the interactions: it is to witness the “theater of life” that Erving Goffman so well described in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1971). For the people present in these streets do not simply exist: they explicitly play social roles—spectators, professionals, actors, directors, programmers...
Attention as creative act
This experience of street-as-theater, provided we give it attention comparable to that which we accord to shows in venues, can prove unexpectedly rich. It offers its share of humanity, cultural learning, emotions, surprises, and micro-narratives. Some contemporary shows do nothing other than bring to the stage slices of raw life, radio programs, recorded dialogues, whose theatrical transposition, sometimes minimal, suddenly reveals all their human depth.
But why wait for a director to operate this transmutation for us? We can decide ourselves that the street is a stage and thus receive equally powerful revelations. One might object: why then come specifically to the Avignon Festival? Isn’t this experience accessible in any street in the world?
Certainly, but the festival context creates an irreducible singularity. The reasons that bring people together in this place and at this time generate interactions, energies, possibilities, an artistic gaze, that exist nowhere else. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasized in Phenomenology of Perception (1945), “the body is our general means of having a world,” and this world takes on a unique coloration according to the space-time in which we inscribe ourselves.
Beyond hierarchies: the personal legitimation of experience
I insist on this fundamental point: there exists no objective hierarchy between social experiences. Coming to the Avignon Festival to see shows is not “better” than coming without seeing any. Each trajectory generates its singular experience. Even the frustration of not seeing what others have seen can constitute a fascinating experience in itself.
Yet social hierarchies impose themselves, insidious and brutal. The “In Festival,” with its high prices and implicit codes, demands not only economic capital but also what Pierre Bourdieu called “symbolic capital,” this knowledge of the milieu that allows one to navigate its meanders with ease. Many are those who frequent the Avignon Festival year after year without ever entering the “In,” without feeling the slightest frustration. They participate in the festival according to their own modalities, legitimating in their own eyes their specific form of experience.
For this is truly the essential: any experience acquires its value as soon as we put ourselves in a position to confer symbolic value upon it ourselves, to receive what it has to offer us. This value is embodied in the narratives we construct, the list of shows seen and our impressions, but also the narrative of encounters, emotions, unexpected discoveries.
Presence as the condition of authentic experience
One can even have romantic encounters at the Avignon Festival. Banal observation? Not if we consider that the festival context tints these encounters with a particular quality. The desires that arise in this framework, nourished by the ambient creative effervescence, bear the imprint of their birthplace.
Thus, I believe that the question of presence to oneself, whatever the context, constitutes the essential for fully benefiting from any social experience. To be a “spectator of the world”, according to Montaigne’s beautiful formula, is to grant privileged attention to what surrounds us, to refuse to relegate daily life to the rank of non-event.
To choose to be a spectator is to legitimate the experience in progress. And this quality of presence fluctuates: one show will find us preoccupied by professional or emotional concerns, rendering us impermeable to its proposal; another will seize us in a moment of openness where everything becomes possible in the opening of our imagination.
Transformative presence
What creates work, ultimately, is our living and transformative presence in a given space. As Simone Weil wrote in The Need for Roots (1943), « attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity ». At the Avignon Festival as elsewhere, this generous attention transforms each moment into potential theater, each encounter into dramaturgy, each wandering into performance, if we take the trouble to see theater everywhere.
It is not a matter of hierarchizing experiences according to external criteria, but of recognizing in each of them the possibility of a revelation, provided we know how to be fully present to them.
Art as presence and transformation
The work of art does not reside in the created object but in the relationship woven between creation and reception, in this multiple temporality where artist, work and spectator meet and mutually transform each other. The time of creation reveals that art is less technical mastery than presence open to the creative accident, less production of objects than setting the world in motion. The concept of “nefaire” describes this capacity to transform in depth, to create movement that goes beyond simple instrumental doing. In the epoch of its digital mediation, the work of art sees its aura reconfigured: it is no longer in the uniqueness of the original but in the singularity of each experience of reception. The image, oscillating between resemblance and dissemblance, between representation and new reality, shapes our being in the world more profoundly than we imagine. Theater teaches us that the distinction between real life and fiction is itself an illusion: culture is not separate from life but constitutes a refined means of understanding and exercising it. From this perspective, the artist becomes a “writing being” whose words transform reality, and innovation emerges not from technical virtuosity but from the singular presence that invents new uses, new ways of inhabiting the world.
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