Christophe Raynaud de Lage has been photographing the shows of the Festival d’Avignon for seventeen years now, both backstage and on. Courtyards, cloisters, gymnasiums, quarries, wind, heat, and rain are all part of the background for him… Day and night, he takes thousands of pictures destined to a strange life. They appear on the Festival’s website almost in real time on the night of the premiere, show up as illustrations for a news article the next day, and provide a touch of colour on social media throughout the Festival… A few weeks later, they accompany artists on international tours, before being collected by the Bibliothèque nationale de France a few years down the line. For L’œil présent (The Present Eye), the photographer chose for once not to follow the linearity of time. Here he calls on our senses, sight, touch, and hearing, with each image “a reminiscence, an incisive fragment” of a particular edition. An immersion into the living memory of the Festival, this exhibition offers a stroll from place to place, exploring the shows’ themes and points of view, providing mise en abyme and reflections. Christophe Raynaud de Lage wants the audience to lose themselves into those images, to feel and, why not, re-experience his festivals.

Laurent Gachet
A film director by training and a collaborator of choreographer Dominique Bagouet, Laurent Gachet created the magazine Arts de la Piste, his first collaboration with Christophe Raynaud de Lage. After conducting academic research about the challenges of urban creation, he launched the Académie Fratellini project, an inspiration factory for which he served as managing director and artistic director until 2008. Laurent Gachet is now an independent stage creator who likes to explore the many fields of representation. Along with Christophe Raynaud de Lage, who bears witness to the plurality of all those artistic experiments, he is working on a study of the narrative of images.

Pierre-André Weitz
Pierre-André Weitz first set foot on a stage at the Théâtre du peuple in Bussang when he was but 10. There he performed, sang, designed and built sets and costumes until the age of 25, while studying architecture in Strasbourg and joining the Conservatoire d’art lyrique. At the same time, he also performed in the chorus of the Opéra National du Rhin. In 1989 he met Olivier Py, and has since designed the sets and costumes for all his shows. This crucial collaboration has led to a conception of scenography in which set changes are dramaturgy and seen as choreography of the space.

The catalogue of the exhibition L’œil présent is published by Théâtre(s).

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Les Damnés, Ivo van Hove, 2016 © Christophe Raynaud de Lage – Festival d’Avignon

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