Avignon Festival: Mario Banushi's Balkan Travels

The least we can say is that Athens doesn't look like a tourist cliché on this May day. A wind from Africa has covered the city with a thin layer of Saharan dust, like a veil of ash. We follow Mario Banushi into a modest, quiet neighborhood with sleepy buildings, and we feel like we're in a small Balkan town, far, far from the grandeur of Athens. The young director, who is the artist to discover at this Avignon Festival 2025, where he presents his creation entitled Mami , grew up between this neighborhood of Ilioupoli and the rural outskirts of Tirana, Albania. He takes us to the places of his childhood like so many stations on a journey that has seen him, in just a few years and three shows, become, at the age of 26, the darling of theater programmers around the world, from Avignon to Taipei, via Montreal and Sydney. A “fairy tale” from which he himself does not return.

From the outset, with his first creation, Ragada (2022), he imposed his totally singular universe: a theatre without words, marked by the seal of ritual and full of images of radiant beauty, which irresistibly brings to mind in its poetic strangeness the world of the great Georgian filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov . “As I grew up in an environment completely removed from art, and with the idea that no one was going to help me, I really had to start from myself, from my emotions, from my sensations, to create,” he says, pointing to the small open space in the park next to his childhood building, where he would come alone, as a teenager, to declaim monologues.

You have 81.72% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.