Festival d'Avignon – 80e édition

The Avignon Festival represents 80 years of universalism in service of cultural heritage and contemporary creation. 80 years of placing art in perspective with social reality. 80 years of a political and aesthetic project that observes the great metamorphoses of live performance and, through them, the diversity and complexity of the world.

Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Cour d'honneur of the Palais des Papes is the cradle of the Festival, which takes over more than 30 places in the city and its region. Within works of art but also gymnasiums in cloisters, chapels in gardens, quarries in churches, the Festival welcomes more than 120 spectators during more than 000 appointments (shows, debates, meetings, readings, screenings ).

To be the international meeting place for theatrical creation, the happy marriage between memory, history, heritage and the future, experimentation and; accentuate the territorial presence; make ecology a priority concern and promote accessibility in all its dimensions: these are the main axes of the direction of Tiago Rodrigues at the head of the Festival since September 2022.

In 2013, the FabricA, the first space specially designed for the Festival, was inaugurated. A place of residence for artists throughout the year, it houses a room the same size as the stage in the Cour d'honneur and helps to intensify the work of raising awareness of performing arts that the Festival carries out with all audiences.

In 2026, following English, Spanish, and Arabic, the Avignon Festival will welcome an Asian language that is now spoken throughout the world: Korean. South Korean culture fascinates the planet: K-pop, cinema, television series, literature… But beyond this soft power, we want to reveal the richness of Korean performing arts.

For this 80th edition, Tiago Rodrigues, director of the Avignon Festival, invites us to look to the future: "This edition will be inscribed in the future and projected towards the next eighty years of the Festival. It is to the future that the questions raised by the invited artists will be addressed, in connection with the utopia of Jean Vilar."

For the second year in a row, the dates are aligned with those of the Avignon Off Festival.

See you in early April to discover the program for the 2026 Avignon Festival.

More information at https://festival-avignon.com/