Director of the Festival d'Avignon from 1985 to 1992.
Alain Crombecque worked as a press agent at the Autumn Festival of Paris from 1974 to 1978.
He was involved in various international missions from 1978 to 1981 including the Festival of Nancy.
From 1981 to 1985, he was Artistic Director close to Patrice Chéreau at the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers.
He then became the Director of the Festival d'Avignon.
From 1993 to 1995, he was the Managing Director of the "Premier Siècle du Cinéma" (First Century of Cinema) and since 1993 he also directed the Autumn Festival.of Paris.
Alain
Crombecque passed away on the 12th of October 2009. Between 1985 and
1992 he was the artistic director of the Festival d’Avignon where he
left a very potent and personal imprint: that of a man with free and
sensitive artistic choices, of someone in tune with the artists whom he
trusted entirely. It allowed him to give birth to extraordinary
artistic adventures which marked not only the history of the Festival
d’Avignon, but the history of the performing arts; starting with Peter
Brook’s Mahâbhârata in 1985,
which took the Avignon audiences on an unforgettable journey all
through the night in the Boulbon quarry used for the first time as a
venue for the Festival. Another great and memorable epic moment, was
Paul Claudel’s Soulier de satin (The Satin Slipper),
staged in 1987 in the Cour d’Honneur by Antoine Vitez who would be
invited back regularly to the Festival over the years. Alain Crombecque
was indeed an insatiable scout of artistic territories, an
indefatigable watchman. He was the first to invite to the Festival some
of the greatest directors of our times: Patrice Chéreau, whom he
convinced to stage Hamlet in
the Cour d’Honneur in 1988; Anatoli Vassiliev, whom he discovered in
Moscow in 1987, and invited immediately to present his work in France.
A lover of all artforms, Alain Crombecque opened the festival doors to
literature and poetry (notably with the works of Francis Ponge, Georges
Pérec and Nathalie Sarraute), to contemporary music (that of Messiaen,
Boulez and Luigi Nono) and to traditional music from India, Persia and
South America introducing non-European cultures to the Festival. At the
same time he never overlooked the founding principles of Jean Vilar’s
Festival and was attached to continuing its history and to maintaining
links with its original actors: Maria Casarès, Alain Cuny and Jeanne
Moreau to name but a few.
The spirit with which he ran the
Festival d’Avignon, then the Festival d’Automne in Paris, remains an
inspiration for us. His advice, as well as his discreet visits to each
of the Festivals we have programmed, encouraged us greatly to continue,
in our turn, the adventure of the Festival d’Avignon.
