Avignon 2026: Korean, guest language of the festival
The event, which has not hosted artists from the peninsula for 25 years, will also highlight "lesser-known" Korean performing arts, says artistic director Tiago Rodrigues.
The Avignon Festival will make Korean its guest language in 2026, its artistic director Tiago Rodrigues announced on Monday, also hailing the public success of the 2025 edition, with attendance at its highest level in ten years.
After Arabic this year, the international theatre festival will head to the Korean peninsula and to a language which, thanks to culture, has become "very global even though it is not well known" , said Tiago Rodrigues .
Skip the ad"It's very interesting to see that this language, which could be called small, originating from a small, distant country, has spread completely throughout the planet through culture, cinema, television series, music, literature," explained the Portuguese playwright, citing in particular the South Korean writer Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature.
In 2026, the Avignon Festival, which has not hosted artists from the peninsula for 25 years, will also attempt to highlight "lesser-known" Korean performing arts and show "beyond preconceived ideas a society with its complexities," the artistic director explained.
With five days to go before the end of the 2025 edition, he also welcomed an attendance rate of 96.5% for the 42 shows of the "in", evoking "figures not seen since 2016 and which we think we can still exceed" . The Festival was notably marked this year by the creations of big names in live performance ( Thomas Ostermeier , Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker ...) and a theatrical restitution of the Mazan rape trial.
"At a time when we are questioning the strong relationship with the public cultural service in France, this is proof of its vitality and people's interest in participating in cultural life," stressed Tiago Rodrigues, who expressed his concern for live performance at a time of budgetary restrictions. While the Festival itself has retained its public funding, the artistic director notes a "deterioration of the entire living landscape in France." "We are not just in solidarity, we are worried," he said.
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