Actoral, an international festival of contemporary arts and writing, gives the opportunity to see and hear the diversity and vitality of contemporary creation until October 13, mixing dance, theatre, visual arts, performance, music, cinema and literature. More than two hundred French and international artists come to Marseilles to perform every autumn for three weeks, shaking up and clashing artistic disciplines.
DThe Actoral festival is certainly a showcase for the arts. For this 18th edition, the festival cultivates interdisciplinarity with more than 100 events on stage, including 3 creations, 12 2018 creations, 11 French premieres and 1 preview, 87 projects, 177 artists and 11 countries in some 20 cultural venues in Marseille.
If Actoral is an exciting human and artistic adventure, it is also a territorial event that brings people together. The festival brings together some twenty cultural venues. Together, it welcomes, co-directs and shares its know-how to offer a hundred or so exceptional events. Thanks to this complicity, thousands of festival-goers criss-cross the streets and neighbourhoods of Marseille to confront their personal vision of the world with the constant questions posed by the artists.
Encouraging curiosity, exigency and critical spirit is the will of the festival. It is part of an approach in favour of discovery and artistic practice for the young people of the area. With the help of passionate teachers and militant associations, many projects are developed: workshops to prepare for the show, festival pathways, discovery of the performing arts, meetings with artists...
It is not enough to say that we are contemporary in order to be contemporary, we must also write and act in contemporary life in order to be part of it. This is exactly the challenge launched several years ago by the actoral festival. Looking for authors, experimenting with forms, diversifying and crossing artistic approaches. To analyse the world around us, to probe it, to give it back all its realities as well as all its poetry. But also to federate places and people; to create links around creation.You come across different names and personalities: Laetitia Dosch, Rodrigo García, Dave St-Pierre & Alex Huot, Maria Hassabi and many others. We find faithful followers such as Alexander Vantournhout or Théo Mercier, with this year a special focus on Dutch artists. There will even be a Conference on Nothing presented by the freedom-loving choreographer Jérôme Bel. Or again, this spotlight on Julien Prévieux, an artist who plays with everyday gestures, who sometimes invents them. actoral is not just about shows, exhibitions or encounters, it is also a seismography of our time.Éric MangionPresident of Actoral."
This eighteenth edition of the festival will focus on the new Dutch contemporary scene. Seven artistic proposals are programmed with the complicity of the Dutch Performing Arts.
For the first time, two major public meetings will be held, one in collaboration with the SACD: Une question d'écriture (?) and another in collaboration with the new media AOC and Éditions Jean Boîte: Les écritures numériques. Performing artists, authors, writers, journalists, professionals from the literary and theatrical world are invited to exchange and feed the debate with the public.
Actoral promotes and facilitates access to the festival. This year again, an incentive pricing policy is developed. More than twenty artistic events are free, the Pass Actoral, valid for two people, allows you to benefit from super-reduced rates on the entire program. During the festival, free shuttle buses are provided to connect the most remote places from 25 September to 13 October 2018 in Marseille.
Is there an expression that dominates our times?One term is more appropriate than another to define it?But is it good to define it?There is an observation that we can make, an expression that we hear more particularly in the modern world, an expression that often comes back to us: I'm running out of time! We are running out of time!So time seems to run faster for our contemporaries than for our ancestors? A kind of shrinking of space-time. Our territory of life, this time that helps us determine our actions, that allows us to understand what our beings need to live, seems to be seized by a whirlwind of new concerns that lead the dance.The economic, social and political territory is thus subject to the diktat of the almighty communication of the modern world. We can no longer take a step without our minds being guided by the sacrosanct power of communication followed immediately by "The crisis", another key word that crystallizes many anxieties for our contemporaries.One crisis disappears while another appears and takes its place, and this oppressive sequence has been going on for several decades. Art, far from changing life, is still for a while (?) the place where we can regain the ground of imagination, desires, dreams, thoughts and perhaps take back time to time?So our hope for this festival is to invite you to take with us the very different paths of the artists of this edition - the eighteenth! - which sounds as this moment hoped for or feared by our majority may have sounded. A time for rediscovered utopias, a time for independence of thought, a time or strengths of all, we hope to take part in the future of the world.So we invite you to discover three weeks during these new territories of art made of dreamed utopias, of play with new technologies with the exhibition of Julien Prévieux who opens the festival, of egalitarian desire with Laetitia Dosch and her tale HATE, of provocative humour with Rodrigo García and his encyclopaedia of paranormal phenomena, to name only the artists who open the first week of the festival.Let us also mention the beautiful complicity of ten years with the SACD, with the Object of Words, which gives pride of place to today's writers.Another highlight of this edition was an encounter with the new Dutch stage, where the body dominates the performance to better confuse the new rules of the world.actoral 18 is an edition that makes the body, mind and eyes pleasure a brand that we hope will stay with you for a long time.Hubert Colas, Acting Director"
Header image : "Mitra" by Jorge Leon. In his new creation, filmmaker and director Jorge León unveils, from a digital correspondence, the moving portrait of a woman whose thirst for justice will not prevent her from assuming her destiny.
