With 30 performances and as many complementary screenings overtaking the walled Provençal city’s cloisters, churches, and plazas, as well as its state-of-the-art black boxes, the three-week Festival d’Avignon is an embarrassment of riches. Still, I’d make a point of catching La Ribot’s Juana ficción, about the 16th-century would-be queen Juana I de Castilla. The powerful men in her life—her father the king, her son—made themselves more powerful at her expense, exiling her to a distant castle for 47 years for supposed madness so they could rule in her place. The Spanish-Swiss La Ribot is also a queen; her kingdom is the absurd. “I’m eccentric,” the 62-year-old dance-trained performance artist told El País a few years ago, when the Venice Biennale bestowed on her the Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement. “What occurs at the center has never interested me.” Though the actor Juan Loriente will be on hand to represent the villainous men, and the adventurous conductor-composer Asier Puga will approximate the cancioneros of the Spanish court with his Zaragoza chamber orchestra and a small choir, La Ribot will likely render the gloomy, forgotten queen with her usual unguarded, comical, and affecting indirection. —Apollinaire Scherr