lThe final stages of the Paralympic Games have barely finished when other flames are already being lit in Paris and the Île-de-France region. From 8 September to the end of December, the Autumn Festival will be defending the values of openness and universality, no longer on the sports fields, but in the 62 venues in the Ile-de-France chosen to host this new edition. The great cultural event for the return to school.
True to its DNA, the 2024 Fall Festival aims to be the meeting point between disciplines (music, theatre, dance, cinema, visual arts, performance, etc.) and artists from all over the world (31 countries in total), some of them lifelong Faithful, others invited for the first time, veterans and young guards gathered in the same program. “coexistence of points of view”As Francesca Corona, artistic director of the festival since 2022, sums up, for whom this edition is marked by issues around exile, diaspora, social and historical justice and, more broadly, by a “high complexity” in the way of weaving stories about our world.
A documented theatre
And who better than the Lebanese duo Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué, exiled in Germany since 2013, to embody this multiple and tormented geopolitics, these stories and these diasporic journeys that are the foundation of many creators present at the festival? With a dozen shows on the programme, including a creation based on the minutes of the trial against Bertolt Brecht in the United States in 1947 (Four walls and a roof), The “portrait” that the festival dedicates to this pair of artists offers a unique opportunity to immerse oneself in a singular work, a documented theatre where narrative boundaries explode.
The autumn journey promises to be rich in discoveries and reunions. It will adopt Lithuanian accents, with the visual artist Lina Lapelyte, poetic advocate of “being together”; Iranian, with the choreographer Sorour Darabi and his first opera inspired by Arabian Nights ; Thai, with the major retrospective offered to the filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul; the Tunisians, with the invitation to the Dream City festival; Italian too, with the “portrait” dedicated to the composer Clara Iannotta, also based in Germany after having lived in France and the United States. “I left behind a bit of a sense of belonging”he tells us. A leitmotiv that many artists invited to this year’s Autumn Festival could take up again and which wonderfully symbolises the profound meaning of this edition with its doors decidedly open.
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