Festivals: after the earthquake

Arabesques Festival, Montpellier, September 2019: Sofiane Saïdi then Marcel & Rami Khalife Feat set the event alight; audiences from neighborhoods, social and geographical centers and peripheries are jubilant.

Emmanuel Négrier, University of Montpellier

Arabesques Festival, Montpellier September 2020. To the surprise of many, the festival goes ahead, thoroughly revised in view of the circumstances. As the organizers admit, it's less a question of persisting as an economic agent than of achieving two objectives that most festivals set themselves.

The first is to support artists from a particular genre or aesthetic; in this case, world music, which has been particularly hard hit by the plague and its impact on mobility. The second: to preserve the annual rendezvous that the festival and its team will have given to partners, volunteers and audiences, even if their numbers are necessarily more limited.

These two keys to festival activity have been the mainstay of some events. They were not enough for most others. A third dimension of festival activity led many public players to change their outlook, and for some quite brutally: the economy. We discovered that the elimination of over 2,000 events (the number of events affected by Covid-19 between April and August 2020 is estimated at around 4,000) had a real and sinister economic, social and artistic impact.

Economic and social impact

Over the course of 6 months, the total amount not spent by festivals and festival-goers and their knock-on effects exceeded two billion euros. Those who thought that the necessarily ephemeral nature of an event made it a frivolous or subsidiary economic operator are in for a surprise: behind the festival, a particular but important economic world has developed thanks to what can be called the "festivalization" of culture.

In terms of employment, of course, the contrast is greater between the few permanent employees and the wide variety of professionals working for a week, a month or a one-off performance. But here too, thousands of jobs have been lost, thanks to government decisions on unemployment and the postponement of intermittence anniversary dates (to avoid asking artists who are no longer able to perform to prove their hours of activity!

From a social point of view, we need to mention the work of volunteers, who on average in France represent two-thirds of the workforce mobilized by events. So it's a whole world, not necessarily professional or salaried, but definitely committed to the festival epic, that has been left out in the cold. Lastly, the artistic commitments wiped out by these cancellations represent, for some, a decisive part of their professional year, or even future commitments.

Meeting place and business concentrate

The festival is not a moment closed in on itself, nor is it an operator focused solely on its business. A festival is a stage in a journey, a meeting place, sometimes a quasi "market". Avignon embodies this for theater, Auch for circus, Cannes for cinema. A festival is a concentration of companies: artists' agents, cooks, the brilliant inventor of the world's fastest machine for cleaning returnable glasses, technical and security service providers, etc.

So a festival's destiny is also that of the whole small world of a sometimes modestly profitable, often not-for-profit economy, but one that can't afford deficits, and can't stand silence.

Last but not least, a festival is a small, ephemeral republic, bringing together participants with often diverse profiles, more or less connoisseurs and fans of parts of the program, but who adopt forms of tolerance towards the tastes and behaviors of others that they often promise to experiment with. At a festival, the risk involved in discovering a new style or an unknown artist is cushioned by the jubilation, the collective practice, the effusion.

The health crisis forced the operators to remain silent only after they had tried everything with the prefects, health authorities and local authorities. Often, despite the cancellation, we wanted to light the little flame of existence, or make an appointment, already, for next year! Les Moments Musicaux du Tarn had to cancel, but welcomed François-René Duchâble for a concert that, for one evening, gave music the scent of a vaccine against the grim disease. The Festival des Suds (Arles) followed suit. In Corrèze and Creuse, the Kind of Belou and Musique à la Source festivals held on to their dates, failing to reproduce the specific blend of artistic production, conviviality and celebration.

An anthropological phenomenon

The importance acquired by festivals in social life is confirmed by two final phenomena. On the one hand, of all cultural practices, festivals have recorded the highest growth rate over the past twenty years, while concert, museum and cinema attendance has tended to stagnate.

The recent study by the French Ministry of Culture's Department of Studies, Forecasting and Statistics is very clear on this subject.

The other proof is the proliferation of festivities, around a wide variety of artistic themes, that have taken place despite the crisis. This shows that festivalization is far from being simply a "live" response to the crisis in the recording economy, as is sometimes claimed. On the contrary, it is an anthropological phenomenon, and it is in this respect that it is painfully confronting the health crisis, just as it had previously confronted the rise of security issues.

But festivals are a deceptively homogenous world. In economic terms, we can already identify two main types of festival that are experiencing the crisis differently, because their strategic uncertainty is not of the same nature.

On the one hand, there are the festivals that are heavily dependent on subsidies, often for classical music, theater, dance and, to a lesser degree, jazz and world music. Here, the uncertainty concerns the future of cultural policies in 2021-25. Maintaining most of the promised subsidies in 2020 cannot be considered a guarantee of survival, even if it is an important lever that many foreign festivals do not have at their disposal. At the other end of the scale are festivals that rely heavily on ticket sales. These are frequently found in the contemporary music sector (rock, pop and electro in particular). They are largely dependent on audience behavior, in a context where the fill rates required to break even have increased considerably in recent years. Even if many audiences have agreed to postpone their bookings (until 2021) rather than refund their money, this only produces an unusual cash flow, but says nothing about the short-term economic sustainability of these events. And this applies not only to the festivals themselves, but also to all the companies that are more or less linked to them.

Two ways of thinking

In the face of these uncertainties, we need to consider two different approaches: public action and collective action. Public action calls into question the role that the State and local authorities wish to play in this area. Curiously, while the latter are among the most interventionist in Europe, they have few explicit political priorities in this area. What's more, there's no real systematic observation of the field, despite the recent, albeit little-supported, efforts made by the Ministry of Culture.

Apart from the ministry in charge, the French government can monitor two sensitive issues. The first is the fight against any abuse of a dominant position, precisely those linked to the concentration that has affected the sector in recent years. The second is to review the rather chaotic policy on security costs, which are burdening festival economies inappropriately and very unevenly from one territory to another. The Collomb circular of May 15, 2018, in fact intended to re-evaluate compensation, by festivals, for law enforcement services (police or gendarmerie) in the vicinity of events. Its application gave rise to huge disparities between departments, and to the Conseil d'État's annulment of part of the scheme on the grounds of excess of power.

Collective action is the other path, which respects the singularity of the festival ecosystem, whose own resources (refreshment stands, catering, merchandising) and expenses (technical, security, fees) are higher than in the world of "cultural permanence"(francefestivals.com/media/francefestival/6-sofestindicateurs.pdf). This originality forces festivals to organize their own world, weaving cooperative links; questioning the perspectives linked to the active participation of audiences; taking an interest in what confinement has engendered in digital mode: the idea of outpourings at a distance. Cooperation between players is an old idea, often destroyed by the opportunism of a few.

Yet the festival world is changing before our very eyes. In the past, the founders had a highly individualized, even heroic and patrimonial vision of "their" festival. They were like God on earth. The new generation of managers has neither the same capital nor the same values to impose themselves majestically on their territory. And if God has always been uncooperative, the apostles of today's festival world are more eager and compelled than ever to be so.

Emmanuel Négrier will be present at the États Généraux des festivals, on October 2 and 3 in Avignon. He will be speaking on the theme of the evolution of festival business models.

Emmanuel Négrier, CNRS Research Director in Political Science at CEPEL, University of Montpellier, University of Montpellier

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.