Written by Romain Blachier.
Image credit: Taiwan Avignon off Facebook.
In July 2024, Taiwan was the first guest of honour of the Festival Off d’Avignon, France’s largest performing-arts market; Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture announced it as the first guest country of honour. The Festival Off’s page is still online two years later, and it disagrees with itself. The heading reads “Taïwan (Chine),” glossed in English as “Taiwan (China).” Two paragraphs down, the French speaks of ties between the festival and “Taïwan (Chine);” the English speaks of cultural bonds between France and Taiwan, parentheses gone. Where the English calls Taiwan a guest country, the French never uses the word pays. Of the five programme strands the page lists, the French carries “(Chine)” every time; the English drops it in four cases out of five.
Nobody planned that inconsistency, which is what makes it useful. This July marked twenty years of Taiwanese companies at the Off, and the anniversary coverage tells a story of steady success. The story is true. But the parenthesis is the wrong thing to look at. What constrains Taiwan in Avignon is not the caption Beijing fights over. It is the language Taiwan is permitted to use, and the people who settle that question are French.
A market, not a pedestal.
The founding act was French. In 1998, Bernard Faivre d’Arcier, then head of the official Festival d’Avignon, invited eight Taiwanese companies. The annual presence came later, in 2007, when the Ministry of Culture and the Taiwan Cultural Centre in Paris (巴黎臺灣文化中心, CCTP) began sending companies not to the IN but to the OFF: the open, self-financed fringe where over a thousand shows compete for European programmers’ attention. Six came that first year. A line-up has been selected every year since.
The IN confers prestige; the OFF is a market, and Taiwan chose the market. Chen Hung-Hsing (陳宏星), who took over the CCTP in February 2026, describes the programme as a school. The significance here is not the three weeks but what companies learn to do afterwards, handling their own publicity and arranging their own European tours. Taiwan pays for the schooling. The Ministry covers flights and logistics; the Cultural Centre pays the rent on La Condition des Soies and supports Les Hivernales.
Beijing disputes the caption.
In March 2026, the Chinese consulate in Strasbourg asked the city to cancel Stefan Kaegi’s This Is Not an Embassy (Made in Taiwan) at Le Maillon. Mayor Jeanne Barseghian replied the same day by restating French law and referred the matter to the state. The Rimini Protokoll production puts three Taiwanese citizens on stage to build a temporary embassy in front of the audience and argue about it: which flag, which anthem, which name. China asked France to cancel a play about Taiwan being unable to have an embassy, and proved the play’s point. What the consulate objected to, concretely, was three Taiwanese disagreeing in public about their own country.
It is an old pattern. In Prague, 2025, China wanted a book fair’s “Countries” category renamed and the flag removed; the director refused. Beijing rarely stops Taiwanese art from being seen. It fights over the caption. Taiwan loses the caption and wins the stage.
France decides the language.
The 2026 line-up was entirely dance: four companies, no theatre, no circus, no puppetry. Across the previous nineteen editions, every discipline had appeared. Chen gives three explanations for the change in the course of a single interview, and they do not agree with one another. Describing the selection, he calls it a happy coincidence. Pressed on the disciplines, he turns to language: Taiwanese theatre in Avignon must always pass through translation, dance need not, and that, he says, is no doubt why 2026 is exclusively contemporary dance. Asked about range, he points to the applicants: purely traditional companies now rarely answer the call. Coincidence, language, self-selection. Three answers, not one of them a decision. Nobody chose, and the outcome is systematic anyway.
The Ministry issues an annual call; some fifty companies answered this year. The four are then picked in close collaboration with the two women who run the partner venues, Anthéa Sogno at La Condition des Soies and Isabelle Martin-Bridot at Les Hivernales. Les Hivernales is a centre de développement chorégraphique national. The Ministry’s own communiqué presents the renewed partnership with that national choreographic centre as an asset, and it is one: it plugs Taiwanese companies into a French touring circuit. It also means that one of the two people who decide what Taiwan may show in Avignon cannot, by statute, programme anything but dance.
The Ministry’s published call for 2026 invited dance, music, theatre and physical theatre alike, and imposed no language condition. The same ministry, in the same cycle, sent a show mixing magic and theatre to the Edinburgh Fringe, where the working language is English. The Avignon selection, made jointly with French venue directors, came out entirely non-verbal. And Taiwan paid for the room.
Language appears nowhere in the stated criteria. Chen lists artistic originality first and by a distance, then the capacity to perform in a foreign context, then the logistics of a tour. It does not need to appear: the capacity to perform in a foreign context carries the language question without naming it. An instrument does not announce the constraint; it produces it, and the outcome then reads as a series of artistic judgements rather than as a filter.
The constraint is also celebrated. At the send-off press conference in Taipei on 2 June, with Taiwan’s culture minister, the head of the European Economic and Trade Office, the cultural attaché of the French Office in Taipei and the British Council all on the platform, the EU representative told the departing companies that people can come to understand one another through performance even with no language in common, and that this is precisely where culture and diplomacy meet. He is right, and that is the difficulty. What is praised as universality is also the shape of the filter.
None of which makes the work decorative. The four pieces draw on Hakka memory and ritual, on the ilisin harvest rite of the Pangcah (Amis) people, on the body permanently bent over a smartphone, and on the collision, inside one choreographer’s training, between ballet, Chinese classical dance and the contemporary. Huang Huai-Te describes that trained body as an archive of Taiwan’s history pulled taut by geopolitics, and notes that a European audience needs no Taiwanese history textbook to read it. As Carla Figueira has argued in these pages, where a state’s diplomacy is blocked, communities whose identity cannot be absorbed into a Chinese national narrative do diplomatic work simply by appearing as themselves. Beijing can dispute a label. It cannot dispute an ilisin.
Taiwanese dance has twenty years of standing in Avignon. Taiwanese theatre, the form that carries words, history and argument, has none this year. Beijing spent two decades fighting over what to call Taiwan on a webpage while the working language of the host country quietly settled what Taiwan could say.
What it costs.
Gary Rawnsley identified the trap a decade ago: Taiwan keeps privileging legitimacy themes, its international status, over credibility themes, which is where the soft-power returns sit. The fight over “(Chine)” is a legitimacy fight on ground Taiwan cannot win. Strasbourg was won by a French mayor invoking French law: the most effective defence of Taiwan’s visibility in Europe was not made in Taiwan’s name.
Chun-Ying Wei, whose doctoral study at Goldsmiths covers Taiwanese cultural diplomacy in the performing arts, concludes that it leans on self-presentation rather than mutuality and lacks a continuous long-term strategy. Avignon is the exception that makes her rule legible: twenty unbroken years, through changes of government in Taipei and a pandemic, is exactly the continuity she found missing. Structurally, though, it remains self-presentation on someone else’s premises, in whatever form survives someone else’s filter. The 2024 honour itself became an annual rotation the following year: Brazil in 2025, the Mediterranean in 2026. Taiwan got a moment, not a position.
August.
What accrues is being built elsewhere. Villa Formose, created in 2023 by the French Office in Taipei with Institut français backing, runs cross-residencies between France and Taiwan, linking the Théâtre Nouvelle Génération in Lyon with the National Taichung Theatre (臺中國家歌劇院). Residencies produce co-authorship rather than display. They are slow and invisible to the press. They are also the only mechanism in the relationship in which a Taiwanese company is not first read and ranked by a French jury before it may appear, and the only one that could, in principle, put a Taiwanese play on a French stage. There are very few of them.
The Off ran from 4 to 25 July. The captions came down with the posters. Twenty years have shown that Taiwan can hold a European stage under sustained pressure, and that French institutions will defend it, in their own name and on their own legal grounds. They have also shown who reads the applications, and in what language. What the next twenty have to show happens now, in August, when the festival is over: whether anyone in France is still working with these artists, and whether one summer one of them will be allowed to speak.
Romain Blachier is associate fellow at Fondation Jean-Jaurès and president of France-Formosa, a French association working on ties with Taiwan. He attended the 2026 edition of Taiwan in Avignon, including the anniversary dinner hosted by the Taiwan Cultural Centre in Paris on 10 July. He works in the energy and cultural sectors and previously contributed to Taiwan Insight on Taiwan’s energy challenges.