DOF

Festival observation device

Partners: Ministry of Culture, France Festival.

CEPEL amount: €42,000

Summary:

The festival ecosystem, within which this dual footprint occurs, requires conducting several simultaneous investigations that respond to and feed into each other. The first concerns economic and social aspects. The second addresses the theme of cooperation and partnerships, which constitute part of this dual socio-territorial footprint. It raises the question of the content and limits of what some people are perhaps a little too quick to predict as the advent of the cooperative paradigm. The third investigation addresses the issue of volunteers, which was approached using a dual methodology: a questionnaire survey of nearly 3,500 individuals at nearly 100 events, and a series of interviews. The fourth deals with audiences, based on a mainly quantitative survey and the collection of more than 26,000 questionnaires gathered at 91 performing arts festivals. Skeptics of cultural democratization will not find confirmation here, far from it. The fifth survey shifts the focus to festival communication on social media. This is another way of approaching the idea of social and territorial footprints, because here the territory is virtual, society is distanced and brought together by networks, and community is a real issue. What festival community do these networks represent and embody? Technological utopias are put to the test. All of this constitutes the project entitled SOFEST.

At the same time, the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020 led the Ministry of Culture to entrust us with a new research mission, complementary to the one embodied by the SoFEST! program. The CEPEL team was therefore tasked with going beyond its initial spatial and temporal scope, involving the drafting of a new contract based on a subsidy from the ministry, paid to France Festivals and then transferred to CEPEL for the mission it was responsible for. For CEPEL, this involved hiring a postdoctoral researcher and interns and remobilizing its permanent resources: two researchers, a survey processing technician, a cartography research engineer, and finally the laboratory's administrative team for the overall management and coordination of human resources, contracts, and schedules.

While SoFEST! focused on live performances and music, the Festival Observation System (DOF) corresponding to this new mission was extended to all areas of festival culture: visual arts, literature, cinema and audiovisual, live performances, and music. This new survey, conducted in 2021 among 1,400 festivals in all these fields, was presented for the first time at the États Généraux des Festivals in Bourges on June 28, 2021. It was based primarily on a socioeconomic questionnaire, the results of which will be published in the fall of 2021.

The extraordinary success of our initiative now requires us to fulfill commitments that we never imagined would be so significant: providing each festival (more than 850) that responded to all of the questions with a comparative report containing data on around 50 indicators, enabling them to see how they measure up against others. Similarly, we provide a similar table to the sixteen networks and institutions that have supported us by promoting the initiative to their own festival networks.

Finally, the DOF approach is characterized by constant monitoring of developments in a sector facing particularly difficult and challenging circumstances. This is part of our broader mission to produce scientific knowledge that is useful to citizens and cultural actors.