38e Rugissants Festival was born in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, the first internet connections, the beginnings of globalisation… A crucial period of change when Western modernity began little by little to disperse in the winds of cultural diversity.
Though the compass of avant-garde creation may have pointed North until that time, musical creation now travels to all latitudes. For the past 20 years, the Festival has accompanied musical artists to these new destinations, to meet new challenges.
It has crossed frontiers of genres and aesthetics. It has taken over public spaces, questioning our daily experiences along the way. It encourages music to join forces with other realms of performing arts and to intermix with other cultures.
“Compose the world” is the guiding theme of this 20th anniversary of the Festival.
“Compose the world” is above all about observing one’s own nature, listening to your pulse, smelling the earth and its elements, discovering its sound landscapes. It’s about understanding its fragile beauty, the consequences of human activity and the plundering of its resources.
“Compose the world” is also about listening to the human world, the traditions from home and afar, man’s relationship with a given territory, which has resulted in the nomadization of music in the contemporary world.
“Compose the world” is about imagining, about projecting on the screen of the future waiting to be invented, with the language and technologies of the present, at the shifting frontiers of sound and image, where the real and the virtual become indistinguishable.
For the 20th anniversary of the festival, more than 60 surprising events, including projects showing for the very first time and world-class creations, will take you on a voyage guided by the pleasure of listening closely to unexpected sounds of rare and precious music from a world in the making.
