This is the intuition behind the new ambitions and dimensions of the ManiFeste Festival. ManiFeste-2025, the Festival du printemps à Paris, is a manifesto for musical creation and live performance, a manifesto for an art that is erudite, attractive and popular, as evidenced by the long series of performances in this new edition. Xenakis' Polytope and the electronics of today, Joan Miró and Hèctor Parra, the Folk songs of Berio and Diana Soh, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle and the sounds of Cyclop. ManiFeste captures the effervescence of contemporary and the strength of modern art; one cannot exist without the other.
The future can't be written, it has to be told. The festival opens with L'Ombre, a fairytale by Andersen transformed into a mixed reality performance by Blanca Li and Édith Canat de Chizy. At La Villette, Heiner Goebbels brings us another ‘narrative’, a short history of the twentieth century through sounds, bodies, and television. Our need for musical intrigue and large-scale forms is irrepressible. Enno Poppe's Prozession, Claudia Jane Scroccaro's Faro, and Michael Jarrell's Archipelagos bear witness to this. ManiFeste, engulfed by its narrative, reaches its logical coda on the opera stage. In Cologne for Philippe Manoury's Last Days of Humanity, and in Aix-en-Provence for Sivan Eldar's opera directed by Peter Sellars.
The future is not written, it is made. This is the legacy of Pierre Boulez. The founder of IRCAM was always concerned with the meaning of artistic direction, which gives direction to the life of a festival, a musical community, or a cultural policy. Life that does not reproduce what already exists, as Diderot once quipped: ‘Everything good and bad that happens to us down here is written up there. Do you know, sir, any way of erasing this writing? Yes, that's precisely what we call ‘creating’.
Frank Madlener, IRCAM director