[Namsan Stroll] K-Theater to Be Showcased to the World at Avignon 2026

As the greenery deepens at this time of year, news of theater festivals can be heard from various places. The 'Seoul Theater Festival', organized by the Seoul Theater Association and now in its 47th year, opened on May 3 and will feature performances for a total of 61 days until June 28. In addition, the 43rd Korea Theater Festival has completed regional preliminaries and is preparing to open its national competition. The oldest theater festival in human history is the tragedy competition held during the Dionysia festival in ancient Greece in 534 BC. During the flourishing of democracy, the Greeks began full-scale theater festivals to celebrate the vitality of Dionysus, their revered deity. In an era with few spectacles, crowds from across Greece filled an auditorium of about 20,000 seats, and even slaves and prisoners were given the opportunity to attend performances. After the ceremonies honoring Dionysus, a three-day competition was held, producing some of the greatest playwrights such as Sophocles.

The Avignon Theater Festival, founded in 1947 by French theater artist Jean Vilar, is a groundbreaking event where various everyday spaces throughout the historic city of Avignon, home to the Papacy, are transformed into stages. Since 2023, Tiago Rodrigues has served as the festival's artistic director; in 2024, he visited Korea at the invitation of the Seoul International Performing Arts Festival. He presented a unique performance, 'By Heart', which he both directed and performed in. During the show, ten audience members who volunteered took to the stage and collectively memorized lines from a Shakespearean sonnet, line by line. Rodrigues, who is always considering ways to share the theater experience with various types of audiences in a changing era, asserts that the very act of memorizing poetry together reflects the essence of theater as an act of sharing emotion and love within a community.

Each year, he invites one language to be featured in the festival's programming, and for the 2026 Avignon Festival, he has selected 'Korean' as the invited language, with plans to showcase Korean performing arts works. Judging by the selected lineup, it seems that Artistic Director Rodrigues's personal tastes are reflected in the choices among the diverse works of the Korean theater scene. Theater is an art where the narrative of drama, the performance of actors, and the spatiality of the venue merge to create a live dialogue with the audience. The works invited this time, such as Gu Jaha's 'Cuckoo', 'History of Korean Theater', and 'Haribo Kimchi'—which earned the Ibsen Award in 2026—Lee Jaram's 'Snow, Snow, Snow', Lee Kyungseong's 'Island Story', and Lee Jinyeob's 'Material', are mostly distinctive one-person theater pieces that cross the boundaries of traditional theater. Meanwhile, a staged reading of Han Kang's novel 'I Do Not Bid Farewell', which won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024, will be introduced on the festival's main stage, the Cour d'Honneur, with performances by Isabelle Huppert and Lee Hyeyoung.

Since theater was officially introduced at the Dionysia festival 2,500 years ago, it has continually evolved along with the times. The works to be presented at the 2026 Avignon Festival represent only a small part of the wide spectrum of contemporary Korean theater. Since these are mostly small-scale productions, there are some regrets about the limitations in presenting the style, excitement, and creativity of Korean performing arts on a grander scale.

Nevertheless, as attempts to communicate with the spirit of Avignon, which has long challenged the conventions and boundaries of the theater, it is hoped that these works will boldly expand the horizons of our K-culture to the world.

Lee Hwawon (President of the Korean Association of Theater Critics and Director of the Center for Borderless Arts)

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.