New TORCH/ Festival D'Avignon Collaboration

TORCH is delighted to partner with the Festival D'Avignon and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche on the annual series of Research and Creation Encounters, taking place on the 8th and 9th July 2021.

This is the eighth year of public conversations between artists involved in the internationally celebrated Avignon Festival and university researchers, in which connections between creative work and current research are shared with audiences. Previous Encounters have shown the richness and diversity of the dialogue between artists and researchers in the humanities, social sciences, and cognitive neuroscience. Just as academic research continues to push the boundaries of knowledge, so the performing arts continue to nourish our experience of the world and our reflections on it; working together, we create new insights into how culture is an essential driver of human evolution and the formation of societies. 

This year's Research and Creation Encounters will explore the overall theme 'The Memory of the Future', asking how societies invent and transform themselves, promoting new thinking about our present moment, and keeping alive the memory of the future.

Across two days, the conversations will consider 'Escaping the Past', 'The Conditions of Happiness', 'Love, Consciousness, and Destiny', and 'When the Past Disappears, or, The Demands of the Future.'

The Encounters are scheduled to take place in person at the Cloître Saint-Louis, 20, Rue du Portail Boquier 84000 Avignon, and online.

Find out more:

Research and Creation Encounters Programme

Festival D'Avingon Full Programme