This piece was one of the highlights of the 2019 Avignon Festival. Not least because Kirill Serebrennikov, long under house arrest by the Putin regime, was banned from leaving his home country. But above all because Outside, a show designed as a tribute to Chinese photographer Ren Hang, confirms the stunning freedom that is a recurring concern of the Russian director. In Outside, he interweaves a biopic of his alter ego—a homosexual artist mistreated by the Chinese regime, who committed suicide at the age of 30—with an operatic fresco that attempts to translate the full power of his visual work. Actors, dancers and musicians engage in a captivating series of tableaux where eroticism, beauty and poetry come together. A rock fresco in the form of a hymn to freedom that received the award for best foreign play by the theatre critics Union of France.