Festivals: after the earthquake
Arabesques Festival, Montpellier, September 2019: Sofiane Saïdi and Marcel & Rami Khalife Feat set the event alight; audiences from neighborhoods, social and geographical centers and outskirts are jubilant.
Emmanuel Négrier, University of Montpellier
Arabesques Festival, Montpellier, September 2020. To the surprise of many, the festival is going ahead, albeit in a radically revised form given the circumstances. By the organizers' own admission, the aim is less to persevere as an economic player than to achieve two objectives that most festivals set themselves.
The first: to support artists working in a particular genre or aesthetic; in this case, world music, which has been particularly affected by the pandemic and its impact on mobility. The second: to preserve the annual event that the festival and its team have created for partners, volunteers, and audiences, even if the numbers are inevitably more limited.
These two key factors in festival activity were the basis for maintaining a few events. They were not enough for most of the others. A third dimension of festival activity led many public actors to change their perspective, and for some quite abruptly: the economy. It was discovered that the cancellation of more than 2,000 events (it is estimated that around 4,000 events were affected by Covid-19 between April and August 2020) had a real and sinister economic, social, and artistic impact.
Economic and social impact
The cumulative expenditure not made by festivals and festival-goers and its knock-on effects exceeded €2 billion over these six months. 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 festivities, a unique 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 on a weekly, monthly, or one-off basis. But here too, this ultimately affects thousands of jobs, which government decisions on unemployment and the postponement of intermittent work anniversary dates (to avoid asking artists who are unable to perform to prove their hours of activity!) have helped to cushion.
On a social level, we must mention the work of volunteers, who, on average in France, represent two-thirds of the workforce mobilized by events. It is therefore a whole world, not necessarily professional or salaried, but very much involved in the festival scene, that has found itself at a standstill. Finally, for some, the artistic commitments destroyed by these cancellations represent a decisive part of their professional year, or even future commitments.
Meeting place and business hub
A festival is not an event closed in on itself, nor is it an operator focused solely on its own business. A festival is a stage in a journey, a meeting place, sometimes almost a "market." Avignon embodies this for theater, Auch for circus, and Cannes for cinema. A festival is a hub of businesses: artists' agents, chefs, the brilliant inventor of the world's fastest machine for cleaning returnable glasses, technical and security service providers, etc.
So the fate of a festival is also the fate of this small world of an economy that is sometimes modestly profitable, often non-profit, but which cannot afford to run a deficit and cannot tolerate silence.
A festival is ultimately a small, ephemeral republic, bringing together participants with often diverse profiles, who may be more or less knowledgeable and enthusiastic about parts of the program, but who adopt forms of tolerance towards the tastes and behaviors of others, which they often promise themselves to experience. At a festival, the risk of discovering a new style or an unknown artist is mitigated by the excitement, collective experience, and effusiveness.
The health crisis forced operators to remain silent with a heavy heart, after having tried everything with prefects, health authorities, and local communities. Often, despite the cancellation, they wanted to keep the flame of existence alive, or even set a date for next year! Les Moments Musicaux du Tarn had to give up, but they welcomed François-René Duchâble for a concert that, for one evening, gave music the flavor of a vaccine against gloom. The Festival des Suds (Arles) did the same. In Corrèze and Creuse, the Kind of Belou and Musique à la Source festivals kept their dates, even if they were unable to reproduce that unique blend of artistic production, conviviality, and celebration.
An anthropological phenomenon
The importance that festivals have acquired in social life is confirmed by two recent phenomena. On the one hand, of all cultural activities, festivals have recorded the highest growth rate over the past 20 years, while attendance at concerts, museums, and movie theaters has tended to stagnate.
The recent study by the Department of Studies, Forecasting, and Statistics of the Ministry of Culture is very clear on this point.
Further evidence of this is the proliferation of festivals, covering a wide range of artistic themes, which have taken place despite the crisis. This indicates that the festivalization phenomenon is far from being merely a "live" response to the crisis in the music industry, 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 faced the rise of security issues.
But festivals are a deceptively homogeneous world. In economic terms, in the face of the crisis, we can already see two main types that are experiencing it differently because their strategic uncertainty is not of the same nature.
On the one hand, there are festivals that are highly dependent on subsidies, often in classical music, theater, dance, and to a lesser extent in jazz and world music. Here, the uncertainty concerns the future of cultural policies for the period 2021-25. The maintenance of 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. On the other hand, there are festivals that depend mainly on ticket sales. These are frequently found in the contemporary music sector (rock, pop, and electronic music in particular). They are largely dependent on audience behavior, in a context where the occupancy rates required to break even have increased considerably in recent years. Even though many audiences have accepted postponing their reservations (to 2021) rather than requesting refunds, this only produces unusual cash flow and says nothing about the economic sustainability of these events in the short term. And this concerns the festivals themselves, but also all the businesses that are more or less linked to them.
Two avenues for reflection
Faced with these uncertainties, two different approaches must be considered: 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, although the latter are among the most interventionist in Europe, they have few explicit political priorities in this area. There is also a lack of systematic observation of the field, despite recent efforts within the Ministry of Culture, which have not been followed up.
The State can, even outside the ministry responsible for it, oversee two sensitive issues. The first is the fight against possible abuses of dominant position, specifically those linked to the concentration that has affected the sector in recent years. The second is the revision of the chaotic policy on security costs, which place an inappropriate and highly unequal burden on festival budgets depending on the region. The Collomb circular of May 15, 2018, sought to reassess the compensation paid by festivals to law enforcement agencies (police or gendarmerie) in the vicinity of events. Its application has led to enormous disparities between departments and to the cancellation of part of the measure by the Council of State on the grounds of abuse of power.
Collective action is the other option, which respects the uniqueness of the festival ecosystem, whose own resources (refreshments, catering, merchandising) and expenses (technical, security, fees) are higher than in the world of "permanent culture" (francefestivals.com/media/francefestival/6-sofestindicateurs.pdf). This originality pushes festivals to organize their own world, forging links of cooperation; questioning the prospects linked to the active participation of audiences; taking an interest in what lockdown has brought about in the digital world: the idea of remote effusions. Cooperation between actors is an old idea, often destroyed by the opportunism of a few.
However, the festival world is changing before our eyes. Previously, founders had a highly individualized, even heroic and patrimonial vision of "their" festival. They were a bit like God on earth. The new generation of leaders does not have the same capital or the same values to impose themselves majestically on their territory. And while God has always been uncooperative, the apostles of today's festival world are more eager and compelled to be so than ever before.
Emmanuel Négrier will be attending the États Généraux des festivals (Festival Forum) on October 2 and 3 in Avignon. He will speak on the topic 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. Readthe original article.