Parallèle 14

Energies

Parallèle is more than a festival. It’s a comprehensive platform that provides support to the international emerging arts scene through producing, distributing, and supporting projects; arts programming; training and professional integration; inclusive experiences of the arts, and reflection on contemporary issues. Parallèle’s complementary activities communicate, converge, and irrigate each other. The platform is about culture in the sense of cultivation: it’s designed to last and is based on close observation of ecosystems and cycles. It’s exciting, demanding, precious, and fragile.

Each year, Festival Parallèle invites you to collectively welcome artists to Marseille and Aix-en-Provence who are reinventing forms, artistic languages, and ways of addressing the public. The festival is an opportunity to turn our attention to unexpected ideas and gestures, to take them in and debate them; to look at the world through a different lens, position ourselves within it, and defend it as we wish. 
At Festival Parallèle, we want a world that’s attentive, supportive, plural, aware, mixed, free, and in motion—and it’s precisely this desire that will bring us together from January 25 to February 10.

Through dance, theater, performance, visual arts, film, and music, we’ll explore our inner landscapes and our ancestral and nomadic ties to the earth; we’ll explore the mutations that take place within us from youth to adulthood, and the layers of memories, cultures, and movements that both hold us together as a community and characterize us as individuals. We’ll experience these memories vividly, in the cosmic and the intimate, in matter and movement, in union and revolt. 
There will be delicateness and fire, obsession and humor.
For a time, we’ll try to become the other and embrace his or her gaze, and this will leave lasting impressions on us. Together, we’ll keep each other warm with a positive, chosen energy: one we can each make our own and that comes at no one’s expense.

Let’s move around the city, explore the terrain, and stand together in the sixteen cultural spaces that have joined us for Festival Parallèle 2024. Their dedication is an honor and a joy! We thank them warmly, as we do every partner and artist participating in the festival’s fourteenth edition.

Lou Colombani and the Festival Parallèle team

Parallèle sees itself as a place of discovery, pleasure and sharing, and defends the values of respect, inclusiveness, equality, diversity and openness.

While caring behaviour may seem to be based on common sense or goodwill (not leaving someone who seems to be in difficulty alone, encouraging listening and dialogue, etc.), sometimes this is not enough, it cannot be taken for granted. The festival, in conjunction with its partners and the artists, is keen to implement measures to ensure that this is a safe environment for everyone, and that everyone's rights are respected. No sexist, homophobic, transphobic, racist or discriminatory attitudes or comments will be tolerated during the festival.

The festival is committed to :

- Placing human beings and their activities at the heart of artistic and cultural action;

- Bringing to life the plurality of artistic forms as the foundation of cultural action: we cannot judge, format and/or restrict the freedom and means of expression that artists intend to explore in order to assume the force of their creation;

- Protecting existing artistic forms and encouraging the emergence of new ones;

- To guarantee the fundamental right to cultural diversity or the right of populations to define themselves as individuals rooted in an original cultural universe;

- To ensure the right to choose and experience one's own culture, which is the basis for the free expression of the people who can be the audience for our events;

- Establish simple and/or simplified conditions for accessibility to artistic and cultural choices for all members of the audience;

- Ensuring participatory democracy by taking into account any dynamic that facilitates the integration of the initiatives and investments of all the parties concerned;

- to affirm the social role played by the organization of a festival ;

- to preserve the environment and natural resources, the common heritage of humanity, for the benefit of present and future generations.

To ensure that these commitments are fulfilled, the festival team implements a number of concrete measures:

- the festival takes care to be eco-responsible at every level of its organization: team transportation, anti-gaspi catering using food from short circuits and sustainable agriculture, reduction in meat consumption, use of recyclable crockery and accessories, implementation of selective sorting on the event sites.

- a charter of commitment to respecting the rights and freedoms of every individual, and to combating all forms of discrimination, harassment and psychological, physical or sexual violence, is appended to the partnership agreements with the venues hosting the festival, and to the disposal agreement signed with the guest artistic teams. In this way, the festival ensures that all its staff work together at all levels to ensure compliance with the law;

- A reminder of producers' responsibility to ensure compliance with the law in the workplace is appended to this charter;

- invite everyone to look after themselves and others, and to accompany anyone who seems to be in difficulty to a safe place and to the festival team.