From around the world: Aix-en-Provence.(International)(Festival d'Aix-en-Provence)

This year's Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, normally one of the highlights of Europe's summer season, was the shortest and most dramatic season of its history. The drama, however, did not unfold in the courtyard of the Archbishop's palace or in the Theatre du Jeu de Paume, but in the narrow lanes of the old city. Angry actors, stage technicians, and other members of the CGT, the Communist union, roamed the streets and hurled invectives at anybody who suggested opening the festival without their consent. To cool down the passions, Stephane Lissner, the festival's director, diplomatically postponed the opening, invited all the participants to a general assembly and took a vote on whether to proceed with the first five nights only. Even though a large majority voted for a return to normal and an orderly start, the Communists disrupted the premiere of La Traviata by chanting, banging pots and pans and setting off fireworks. Since the courtyard of the Archbishop's palace is an open-air stage, the commotion at the door could be heard clearly inside. As the audience left at the end of the performance, they had to run a gauntlet through a hostile crowd that harassed and insulted them as "collaborators." The next morning, on July 9, Lissner canceled the entire season: "If you need police protection," he said, "there is no point in carrying on." Half an hour later, the theater festival in neighboring Avignon, Europe's biggest, was canceled for similar reasons.

The rioting had little to do with Aix and Avignon themselves. The cause of the dispute was a deal signed on June 27 by the MEDEE the French employers' association, and three unions (but not the CGT), which will make it more difficult for the intermittents (about 100,000 part-time performing-arts workers) to get unemployment benefits. The status of the intermittents is a French peculiarity without equivalent in the rest of the world. It was created to support singers, actors, dancers and other performers in their struggle for survival--a noble policy that, unfortunately, succeeded beyond its wildest expectations. The benefits attracted not only genuine talents, but lots of would-be artists who preferred a life of intermittence (three months' work--the minimum requirement--and nine months' unemployment handouts) to a more strenuous job. No wonder the acting on French stages is often excruciatingly bad. The insurance system run by both employers and unions is now deep in the red. This is why they decided to tighten the conditions--a step that might expel 25,000 beneficiaries from the system.

Although the festival lasted only two nights, it succeeded in presenting four new productions. Apart from the unfortunate Traviata and the world premiere of a small-scale chamber opera, Kyrielle du Sentiment des Choses, by thirty-one-year-old Francois Sarhan (neither of which I saw), there were Die Enfuhrung aus dem Serail and a triptych of three short works from the early-twentieth century, conducted by Pierre Boulez.

Enfuhrung, a coproduction with the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, was performed in the open-air Theatre du Grand Jean, ten miles outside of Aix. The distance saved it from the rioters, and the sounds one heard were all Mozart's. Jerome Deschamps and Macha Makeieff, a directorial tandem very popular in France for their slapstick shows onstage and on television, resisted the temptation to translate the eighteenth-century vaudeville of a damsel in distress into a ...