Faced with the unprecedented crisis we have navigated in recent months, the Ambronay Festival has completely reinvented itself for this year’s edition.
It will invite audiences to explore new horizons in a reorganised programme which focuses on the key missions of a Heritage Site for Culture: experimentation, encounters with culture and the promotion of heritage.
Over a period of three weekends and two weeks, from 18 September to 4 October, this edition of the Ambronay Festival focuses on the meeting between a historic monument, a region, its artists and its public, and offers us a series of explorations:
MUSIC AND HERITAGE: Promoting the many assets of the Benedictine abbey of Ambronay, home to the CCR and the Festival for 40 years, through sensory interactive events and concert-visits specially devised for the Journées Européennes du Patrimoine.
NEW WAYS OF COMING TOGETHER: New forms of contact between artists and audiences, with a series of societal and environmental conferences led by the philosopher Dominique Bourg. This Festival will place the spectator at the heart of the artistic process, with interactive and participatory concerts.
MUSIC AND PUBLIC SPACES: During the two weeks either side of the middle weekend of the Festival, the action moves into the village itself, with dawn serenades, concerts in a variety of venues, innovative musical and theatrical experiences in school playgrounds, retirement homes and apartment blocks. A new space in Ambronay, the multipurpose hall, will host repertoire inspired by pop and world music.
ACCESSIBILITY: Short concerts and concerts without an interval, easy for families to access, which will experiment with a new staging plan in the abbey (a relocated stage with bi-frontal positioning for closer proximity to the artists and better visibility for all); new ways of engaging with the audience, for example replacing printed programmes with actors who will announce and comment on the repertoire before the performance. The experimentation also extends to ticket pricing: audiences will be able to choose the price of their ticket from three possible tariffs according to their means or requirements.