EDITO

When the Liège Festival, almost ten years ago, took over the Rencontres d’octobre, we felt certain that it would turn out to be a Festival of our time, offering to a wide public an acute artistic perspective on the crucial questions that beset our age, via innovative performances right up-to-date both in their substance and presentation.

We also hope that for a month the Festival will be the beating heart of the ardent city, as Liège is known, a cross roads of individual, authentic statements by internationally renowned artists, a place where creative ideas, adventure, debate, confrontation, discovery will be a wide open window on our world.

Today, as we celebrate our fifth season, we desire more than ever to remain faithful to these artistic and political objectives, to the identity we have forged, that evidently has generated real enthusiasm amongst both audiences and artists.  Our wish this time is to consolidate our links with other theatres and to let these shows flourish outside the walls of our city. Therefore, a number of these will be presented in Charleroi, Mons, Herve, and in Brussels (at the KVS and the Théâtre National). 
In January 2009, the prestigious magazine, Alternatives théâtrales, will publish a special edition on the Liège Festival with the theme “poetry and politics” which will present and analyse this season’s productions.

Before you discover the programme, we are equally delighted to announce that after two years, the vast building project undertaken by the French Community, the magnificent Manège, is now complete and will be our home.   No doubt, you will scarcely notice the transformations, essentially technical, that have taken place, for we have taken great care to preserve the appearance and the soul of this magic place, the marks of its history and the patina of time.  Thanks to this renovation, the Manège will throughout the year become a vibrant and pulsating centre of culture bursting with effervescent creativity. Indeed, apart from the Theatre de la Place which will continue to present a part of the programme, we will open wide our doors to other artistic partners such as the Festival of Women’s Voices, the International Photography Biennale, D’une certaine Gaieté, Places des Musiques….  We will find regularly throughout the year, fine venues all around the great Manège, Les Nuits du Paradoxe (Paradoxical Nights), programmes always out of the ordinary, spicy, lively and political, that the Festival will co-organise with Michel Antaki and “D’une Certain Gaieté” as a means of prolonging our Festival and its particular flavour.

Let our pleasure last and our culture live!

Jean-Louis Colinet
Director