At the Avignon Festival, gentle madness at the “Summit” with Christoph Marthaler

It's like a drug. A shot of gentle madness in the harshness of the times, which intoxicates you and makes you levitate. An indefinable intoxication, as if the mountain air had rushed into the furnace of Avignon. With The Summit , the Swiss master Christoph Marthaler, 73, offered the Festival, which he had not returned to since 2013, a marvel of a spectacle, where his sense of the aerial absurd vies with political acuity on the times of disintegration in which we live. A gift.

So, first the setting. A wooden chalet that seems built directly into the mountain rock, since it's exposed right through the floor. The place is so high up that it's only accessible by a freight elevator, which first spits out a copy of the Mona Lisa and various other equally unexpected objects, triggering general hilarity. Before giving way to a small group of humans, arriving one by one, three women, three men.

Feathered hats, jacquard wool vests, Tyrolean leather breeches, and hiking boots—it seems we're in the Bavarian Alps—perhaps you're already following our gaze. What are they doing here, these humans who speak French, Italian, (Scottish) English, German, and even an Austrian dialect with archaic overtones? Is this one of those summits of the world's great and the good, discreetly gathered in a safe place (at least in appearance, as we'll see later)?

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