Founded in 1947 by Jean Vilar, the Avignon Festival is today one of the most important international events for contemporary performing arts. Every summer, in July, Avignon transforms into a veritable city-theatre.
The Avignon Festival is an artistic and cultural project founded on universalism, serving heritage and contemporary creation. It puts art into perspective with social reality and offers a reflection on the major transformations of live performance, revealing the diversity and complexity of the world.
The Cour d'honneur of the Palais des Papes is its birthplace. Today, the Avignon Festival takes place in more than 30 venues in the city and its region: gymnasiums, cloisters, chapels, gardens, quarries, churches…
Each year, the Festival welcomes nearly 120,000 spectators and offers more than 400 events: shows, debates, meetings, readings and 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 management of Tiago Rodrigues at the head of the Festival since September 2022.
The FabricA, the first space specially designed for the Festival, was inaugurated in 2013. A place of residence for the artist during the year, it houses a room the same size as the stage in the Cour d'honneur and makes it possible to intensify the work of awareness of live performance that the Festival leads to all audiences.
In September 1947, at the invitation of René Char and the Zervos couple, John Vilar presents three creations in three places in Avignon for « A week of Dramatic Art ». In the Cour d'Honneur of the Palais des Papes, fitted out for the occasion, the Municipal Theater and the Urban V Orchard, will be played a Shakespeare almost unknown at the time in France, Richard II ; The Story of Toby and Sara by Paul Claudel; and The Midday Terrace, second work by Maurice Clavel.
The Art Week continued until 1954, when the event took the name of Festival d'Avignon.
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Created immediately after the death of Jean Vilar in 1971, on the initiative of his closest collaborator Paul Puaux, and with the support of the BNF and the City of Avignon, the Jean Vilar House is today a place of memory and resources, but also a living place that hosts exhibitions, events and meetings all year round to perpetuate the cultural democratization project carried out by Jean Vilar and the TNP.
