Their names are Elia, Nessrine, Camélia, Tanzila. Their names are Noah, Kenzo, Dorian. They are between 16 and 23 years old, come from Vaucluse and Seine-Saint-Denis and, from Tuesday 11 to Sunday 23 July, these young people in reintegration will animate, live from the Festival d’Avignon, a radio program so aptly named “To the youth the microphones”. And you have to see them, on this day of May while they rehearse, take this word, and dare the microphone!
Starting with Noah, a precise and mischievous verb, and Elia who nevertheless easily admits that “at the beginning, [she] didn’t dare”. “The radio, by creating possibilities for words and encounters, can be a bulwark and a glimmer,” says Alexandre Plank, who supervises them. A transmitter can become the focus of a backfire and a microphone can be the voice of a generation, a people or a social class. »
After studying philosophy and dramaturgy at the National Theater of Strasbourg, this 40-year-old was a director at Radio France for ten years during which he made reality widely heard – notably during Nuit Debout, a protest movement against the labor law in 2016. Three years later, he set up, with Amélie Billault, Making Waves, an association created “to promote, through radio and podcasts, the emergence of spaces for dialogue, expression and creation”.
Now participatory
Bringing together journalists, academics, women and men from the performing arts and actors from the associative field, the activity is structured in three poles: an NGO (which aims to set up radio studios in areas in crisis ), a sound creation studio and a work integration workshop which employs around ten people in situations of exclusion, disability or precariousness.
It is in this context that the desire to join the Festival d’Avignon was born, which its new director, Tiago Rodrigues, dreams of as a participatory agora. For the Portuguese playwright, director and actor, “A la jeunesse les microphones” is “a response – or, let’s say, an interpretation – of this spirit of public service and popular democracy so present and so essential to the Festival since its inception. by Jean Vilar in 1947”.
Trained in radio practice since January, “our superyoung people” as Alexandre Plank calls them, must animate an almost daily (from the courtyard of the Saint-Louis cloister and broadcast, from Tuesday to Saturday, on several associative radio stations) made up of chronicles, reports and interviews of artists and cultural actors.
“Permanent Band-Aids”
Until then, there is still a bit of work. On this May day, Alexandre Plank plays both conductor and camp director: “Come on Dorian and Nessrine: we wake up! “; “Elia, I charge you every time you say ‘so.’ Always with infinite benevolence. “They’ve taken matters into their own hands and are starting to have a radio instinct. They learned to tell each other and to listen,” he says, while Mohammed Bensaber, director of the Popular Education and Integration Unit, insists: “The work is never ‘top-down’: we start from what they are. »
Precisely, it is time to revive their attention a little diluted between two games of ping-pong and a slice of pizza. “We’re doing a little show again. This summer, we will be on the air at 7 p.m. sharp, so we start at 3:40 p.m. sharp,” says Alexandre. “We are permanent bandages on what the public service is no longer able to do,” he is not afraid to say. And to add: “By creating a radio that wants to be a space for words and unexpected conversations, a radio where people meet who everything seems to keep away, Making Waves hopes to open interstices and create new relationships. To bring out new forms of solidarity and sharing and to highlight, against all that apparently separates and divides us, what binds us, touches us and animates us collectively. »
For Agathe Morandeau, local development officer in Avignon, what this project has achieved is already brilliant: “Recovery of self-confidence, discovery of the audiovisual world, development of skills in terms of writing and speaking. As proof, at 23, Elia, who had to interrupt her studies to take care of her mother, has just submitted her file to the university. Like everyone else, Noah is jubilant at the idea of being one of them. First time at the Avignon Festival. First time on the radio. ” It’s crazy ! sums up Dorian. And too bad if it happens this summer that there are failures. This contributes, as Alexandre Plank reminds us, to the “live performance” side.