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The metamorphosis of Calisto, the reincarnation of Buddha, the transformation of Louise, the protean Don Giovanni... The focus of the 2025 edition of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence is clearly on the inexorable mutability of all things and the perpetual reinvention of the self. “There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all things are brought into being with a changing nature” says Ovid in his Metamorphoses; and this is reflected in Cavalli’s La Calisto, which depicts a fascinating continuum between nature, mankind and the gods.

While it is true that the works selected for this year’s programme illustrate with a certain degree of consistency the destructive violence that desire inflicts upon the object of desire, and that they take us through that misty realm in which humanity is liable to lose its most fundamental reference points, they nonetheless direct the most vulnerable among us towards the starlit skies of possible emancipation – for which art, when it teaches compassion and solidarity, is often the viaticum. [...]

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