Avignon Festival: Positive Midterm Assessment Ahead of Closing

Avignon – July 22, 2026: With three days to go before the official closing of the Avignon Festival, its artistic director Tiago Rodrigues presented a very positive interim assessment. The 80th edition, which runs until July 25, has once again transformed the city of the popes into a place where theatre is not merely performed, but continues to be contemplated in conversations, processions and quiet evening hours.

At the heart of this edition is the Korean language. Rather than treating the annually invited language as a decorative national presentation, the festival sees it as an artistic starting point for theatrical texts, performances, readings and encounters. Korean literature, its orality and its relationship with the performing arts have gained visible space at this event, which has long regarded itself as a European window open to the world.

A library exhibition presenting Korean literature has been installed at the Cloître Saint-Louis. Organized jointly with the Korean Cultural Institute, it also refers to the 140th anniversary of diplomatic relations between France and Korea. This is not a side note in the program, but a quiet intellectual accent. Here, books become passports connecting language and stage without resorting to grand symbolism.

Rodrigues, who has led the festival since 2023, thus continues his vision of an open, internationally oriented Avignon. The Portuguese director and playwright has extended his contract until 2030. His programming approach seeks not catchy slogans, but friction. It seeks works that simultaneously engage political, poetic, intimate and collective questions.

However, the artistic director’s positive assessment should be understood as an interim one. The festival is not yet over, and final visitor figures and economic assessments have not yet been published. This very caution is part of Avignon’s distinctive dramaturgy. It is difficult to definitively measure a festival whose performances continue until midnight in the early evening of its final week.

The strong presence of the Korean language in Avignon also has a cultural-policy dimension. It directs the festival’s attention to an artistic world that is gradually gaining recognition in France, but extends far beyond familiar images of drama, pop music and international cinema. Theatre and literature each demonstrate their own pace: a more precise, more stubborn pace, and sometimes one that is blissfully untranslatable.

Further performances, exchanges, educational and explanatory programs are planned until July 25. For Avignon, this is an important final sprint, but the true assessment must come later. For now, what remains is the impression of a festival that understands international openness not as a trophy to display, but as a way of working—and finds its appeal precisely there.