Lausanne has been the official Olympic capital for 30 years but for even longer this hilly Swiss city has hosted a summer spectacular with a dizzying array of artistic rather than athletic disciplines. This year’s lineup for the Festival de la Cité – its 52nd edition – features more than 80 shows over six days, from wildly contrasting styles of circus, dance and theatre to a participatory street parade and a music programme including choirs, screamo, reggaeton, jazz, postpunk and gabber. Not to mention Swiss-American yodeller Erika Stucky, performing in the city’s 13th-century cathedral, with Johannes Keller on the organ.
Audiences step out of their comfort zones because every show is free on these predominantly outdoor stages clustered together in the historical old town. Each performance is a gateway to another, hopes Martine Chalverat, who took over as artistic director in 2022 and formerly ran the documentary film festival Visions du Réel in nearby Nyon.
Theatregoers may come to the Festival de la Cité for one particular show or to see a familiar artist, she explains, but then stay on for something “a bit more edgy”. Perhaps you’d arrive for the anarchic street-theatre show Splatsch! and stay for Swiss trap musician Fuji, Irish electro noise band Yard or end the night watching amazing Afrorave star Toya Delazy. There are up-and-coming and well-established acts on the bill. “Lots of artists come back with a new project,” Chalverat says. Brazilian choreographer Alice Ripoll, whose favela dance party Zona Franca will be staged on Saturday, has been visiting since she was an emerging talent. “It’s nice for us and for our audiences, to have these relationships with the artists,” says Chalverat. Staging every show for free is a good equaliser for the acts, as well as a great deal for audiences: when Zona Franca was at London’s Southbank Centre last year, tickets started at £20.
The key to programming the performing arts events, says Chalverat, is an understanding of the places in which they will be presented. The stages this year have popped up in the shadow of the imposing, turreted Château Saint-Maire; on the Bessières bridge, with the city as a backdrop; and in the open spaces of the landscaped Hermitage park. Some of the shows on these higgledy-piggledy sites quickly fill up through a first come, first seated policy but various vantage points can be found nearby – and if you arrive late to see the dreaded complet sign, many productions have more than one performance.
“The intersection between the artwork, the audience and the architecture of the place is very important,” says Chalverat. “We are always thinking: where can we imagine this work in Lausanne?” It requires some thinking outside the box when programming. On Friday and Saturday, the festival will present Florencia Demestri and Samuel Lefeuvre’s Troisième Nature, which was staged at Charleroi Dance Biennial last year and is mostly performed with the couple wrapped inside a huge shiny sheet of material which shapeshifts in mercurial fashion. It’s one of the most arresting duets I have ever seen. At Charleroi, where both Chalverat and I saw it, the show was performed indoors under artificial light. In Lausanne, it will be presented in two different open air locations.
Roughly 80% of the festival’s shows were originally made for a black box theatre with lighting. “Here, we have no black box and for [some shows] it’s daytime.” The quick turnaround required for the main stages also determines the programming. The get-in for each show must be swift so there are no over-complicated sets. Chalverat learned a lot in her first year from the technicians about what works well.
Then there’s the weather to consider. On the night I attend, a persistent downpour delays the best show I see, Vilain Chien by the French company La Generale Posthume. It means there’s a preparatory performance of sorts as the team cheerily mop and dry the stage. This is a new company but their camaraderie is quickly established in a show whose convivial choreography builds from embraces and clasped hands, the dancers also taking turns to play music. There is a brilliantly surreal sequence in which a performer – holding pom-poms and dressed in a jacket with a smiley pomeranian portrait – mirrors the twisting moves of an inflatable sky dancer.
Through an accompanying commentary spoken by a compere, the show focuses on twin interests: our domestication of dogs and expectations of circus. In other words, not just how humans tame their animals but also how we prefer our fellow humans to look, behave – and perform on stage. It upends those expectations and finds amusing parallels including between a dog’s “playing dead” trick and an actor’s grand death scene. When I bump into the company later I find they have their own dog, a cute wiry little thing whose breed they have not determined. The show itself defies categorisation. By the end, that stage – now covered in confetti, crumbs and burst balloons – needs cleaning once more.
There is a similarly irreverent and jubilant vibe for Baoum! created by Coline Garcia for the French company SCoM. It’s performed by acrobat Viviane Miehe and beatboxer Thibaut Derathé AKA Oxyjinn, both barefoot and wearing shades of pink and purple. Miehe arrives clambering through the audience to perform a headstand among the front row; Derathé watches on with a sound console on his chest. Balloons are handed to the young audience and used throughout the act, with both Miehe’s movements and Derathé’s sounds alternating between inflated and deflated states. Whether it’s Derathé beatboxing, Miehe spinning her legs in the air like the hands of a clock or both of them moving around the stage with a balloon pressed between their foreheads, there’s plenty here that a young audience will want to try at home.
Many local people have a long relationship with the festival – some of those who visited in their youth now bring their own children. For the 50th edition, the festival asked audiences for their memories and found out how many couples had met here. The programming begins at 5pm each day, with the first shows often packed with children who have just broken up for school holidays, staying out late with parents who perhaps needn’t worry so much about the morning routine.
How does Chalverat decipher what her audiences want? Through surveys, social media and – she stresses – making sure that members of the team are present at all performances to gauge reactions, including if it suited that particular stage and time slot. She is used to fielding responses from seasoned festivalgoers who ask, for example, when it will do New Orleans jazz again or if it will bring back standup acts.
As an outdoor event, weather is key because rain can also damage takings at the bar, which accounts for almost a third of its income. The festival is a private foundation and has public funding from the city of Lausanne and the canton of Vaud, fixed for three-year periods. The energy crisis, inflation and the rising costs of touring have all impacted recently. “All the costs are going up but we don’t have more income as we have no ticket prices [to increase].”
The contracts also required costly, vital improvements in sustainability and access for the festival. Chalverat highlights the challenges of presenting work in public spaces. She has just learned that one street in the area will be closed next year while the cathedral is in a state of constant renovation: “that’s why we cannot plan more than one year in advance”.
In the cathedral, the Belgian show Change of Plans choreographed by Femke Gyselinck is performed to a sun-setting jazz saxophone score composed and played by Adia Vanheerentals and keys played and composed by Hendrik Lasure. Gyselinck dances alongside Zanne Boon and Oskar Stalpaert in a piece co-produced by Ghent disability arts organisation Platform-K. The stained glass windows complement the splashes of colour in some of the trio’s costumes that are hung on a rail and intermittently tried on and returned, as the dancers tackle a handful of distinctively different routines. It could be a metaphor for the festival, where audiences come and go, sizing up each piece afresh. Fomo looms large with overlapping shows on the schedule and, as everything is free, there is perhaps less of a commitment to staying for an entire show.
Lausanne’s major theatres are situated on the other side of the city and not used by the festival. But even the bridge that separates them has a performance, with audiences watching from a sloping triangular platform. Précieuses finds the oddball French quartet La Bête à Quatre achieve their own feats of engineering, building human towers to an operatic recording and striving to outdo each other on a teeterboard. They’ve scattered hay around their temporary stage but the sky forms the main backdrop as it does for so many shows here. In this striking setting, the acrobats really do have their heads in the clouds as they achieve the implausible.
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Festival de la Cité, Lausanne, runs until 7 July. Chris Wiegand’s trip was provided by the festival.
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