Lausanne was the official Olympic capital for 30 years, but for even longer the rugged Swiss city has hosted a summer of spectaculars, with a dizzying array of artistic disciplines rather than athletic ones. This year’s programme of the Festival de la Cité – its 52nd edition – includes more than 80 shows over six days, from wildly contrasting styles of circus, dance and theatre to a participatory street parade and a musical programme that includes choirs, screamo, reggaeton, jazz, postpunk and gabber. Not to mention Swiss-American yodeller Erika Stucky, who plays Johannes Keller on the organ in the city’s 13th-century cathedral.
Audiences are pushed out of their comfort zones because each show is free on these mainly open-air stages clustered in the historic old town. Each performance is a door to the next, hopes Martine Chalverat, who takes over as artistic director in 2022 and previously ran the documentary film festival Visions du Réel in nearby Nyon.
Theatregoers might come to the Festival de la Cité for a specific show, or to see a familiar artist, he explains, but then stay for something “a little more extreme”. Maybe you’ll come for the anarchic street-theatre show Splatsch! and stay for Swiss trap musician Fuji, the Irish electro-noise group Yard, or end the night with the fabulous Afrorave star Toya Delazy. The programme includes both emerging and established artists. “A lot of artists are coming back with a new project,” says Chalverat. Brazilian choreographer Alice Ripoll, whose Zona Franca favela dance party will be held on Saturday, has been visiting since she was a rising talent. “It’s nice for us and our audiences to have those relationships with the artists,” says Chalverat. The fact that each show is free is a nice equaliser for the artists, as well as a great deal for the audience: when Zona Franca was at London’s Southbank Centre last year, tickets started at £20.
The key to programming performing arts events, says Chalverat, is understanding where they will be presented. This year’s stages have appeared in the shadow of the stately, turreted Château Saint-Maire; on the Bessières Bridge, with the city as a backdrop; and in the open spaces of the landscaped Hermitage park. Some of these shows in these jumbled spaces fill up quickly, with a first-come, first-served policy, but there are plenty of vantage points nearby — and if you’re in a dire situation, you can find plenty of them. complete As a sign, many productions feature more than one performance.
“The intersection between the artwork, the audience, and the architecture of the space is very important,” Chalverat says. “We’re always thinking: Where can we imagine this work in Lausanne?” Programming requires thinking outside the box. On Friday and Saturday, the festival will present Troisième Nature by Florencia Demestri and Samuel Lefeuvre, which was performed at last year’s Charleroi Dance Biennale and is mostly a show in which the couple is wrapped in a giant, shiny piece of fabric that changes shape. It’s one of the most striking duets I’ve ever seen. In Charleroi, where both Chalverat and I saw it, the show was performed indoors, under artificial light. In Lausanne, it will be presented in two different open-air venues.
About 80% of the festival’s shows were originally made for a black box theater with lighting. “We don’t have a black box here, [some shows] “The quick turnaround required for the main scenes also dictates the programming. The lead-in for each show has to be fast so there are no overly complicated sets. Chalverat learned a lot from the technicians about what works well in his first year.
Then there’s the weather. On the night I attended, a persistent downpour delayed the best show I’ve ever seen, a performance by the French company La Generale Posthume at Vilain Chien. This amounts to a kind of preparatory performance, with the cast cheerfully mopping and drying the stage. This is a new company, but its camaraderie quickly settles into its cheerful choreography of hugs and clasped hands, with the dancers taking turns playing music. There’s a brilliantly surreal scene in which a performer holding a pom-pom and wearing a jacket with a portrait of a smiling Pomeranian on it imitates the sinuous movements of an inflatable sky dancer.
With accompanying commentary from the host, the show focuses on dual interests: our domestication of dogs and our expectations of the circus. In other words, it’s not just how humans domesticate their animals, but also how we prefer other humans to look, behave, and perform on stage. It subverts these expectations, finding amusing parallels between a dog’s “playing dead” trick and an actor’s spectacular death scene. When I run into the company later, I see that they have their own dog, a cute, wiry little thing whose breed they haven’t specified. The show itself defies categorization. By the end, that stage, now covered in confetti, crumbs, and popped balloons, has to be cleaned up once again.
There’s a similarly irreverent, joyful vibe to Baoum!, created by Coline Garcia for French label SCoM. It’s performed by acrobat Viviane Miehe and beatboxer Thibaut Derathé, AKA Oxyjinn, both barefoot and dressed in shades of pink and purple. Miehe climbs through the audience to perform a headstand, while Derathé watches with a sound console across his chest. Balloons are given to the young audience and used throughout the show, with both Miehe’s movements and Derathé’s vocals alternating between inflated and deflated. Whether it’s Derathé beatboxing, Miehe spinning her legs in the air like the hands of a clock, or both of them walking around the stage with a balloon clamped between their foreheads, there’s plenty here for a young audience to try at home.
Many locals have a long association with the festival; some who visited as teenagers now bring their own children. For the festival’s 50th edition, he asked the audience for their memories and found out how many couples had met there. The programme starts at 5pm each day and the first shows are often full of children who have just left for school holidays and stay out late with their parents who don’t have to worry too much about a morning routine.
How does Chalverat decipher what his audience wants? Through surveys, social media and—as he emphasizes—having team members present at all performances to gauge reactions, including whether it’s a good fit for a particular scene and time slot. He’s used to hearing from seasoned festivalgoers who ask when they’ll do New Orleans jazz again or if he’ll bring back stand-up.
As an outdoor event, the weather is important because rain can also affect the bar’s revenue, which makes up almost a third of its income. The festival is a private foundation and receives three years of fixed public funding from the city of Lausanne and the canton of Vaud. The energy crisis, inflation and rising touring costs have all had an impact recently. “All costs are increasing, but we don’t have more income because we don’t have ticket prices [to increase].”
The contracts also required costly, vital improvements to sustainability and access for the festival. Chalverat highlights the challenges of delivering work in public spaces. He just learned that a street in the area will be closed next year while the cathedral is being renovated: “So we can’t plan more than a year in advance.”
In the cathedral, the Belgian show Change of Plans, choreographed by Femke Gyselinck, is performed to a sunset jazz saxophone score composed and played by Adia Vanheerentals and played and composed by Hendrik Lasure. Gyselinck dances alongside Zanne Boon and Oskar Stalpaert in a piece co-produced by the Ghent disability arts organization Platform-K. Stained-glass windows complement the splashes of color in some of the trio’s costumes, which are suspended from a rail and occasionally tried on and returned as the dancers tackle a handful of distinctly different routines. It could be a metaphor for the festival, where audiences come and go, reassessing each piece. Fomo looms large over the program with overlapping shows, and since everything is free, there is perhaps less commitment to staying for the entire show.
Lausanne’s grand theatres are on the other side of the city and are not used by the festival. But even on the bridge separating them, there is a performance that the audience watches from a slanted triangular platform. The Précieuses find the eccentric French quartet La Bête à Quatre achieving their own feat of engineering, building human towers in an operatic register and trying to outdo each other on a seesaw. They have scattered straw around their makeshift stage, but the sky, as in many of the shows here, is the main backdrop. In these striking settings, the acrobats really do have their heads in the clouds when they pull off the incredible.