DOF

Festival observation system

Partners: Ministry of Culture, France Festival.

CEPEL amount: €42,000

Summary:

The festival ecosystem, the one within which this double imprint takes place, involves conducting several simultaneous surveys, which respond to and feed into each other. The first deals with economic and social aspects. The second deals with the theme of cooperation and partnerships, part of this dual socio-territorial imprint. It raises the question of the content and limits of what some are prophesying, perhaps a little hastily, as the advent of the cooperative paradigm. The third deals with the question of volunteers, who were the subject of a dual methodological approach: a questionnaire survey involving almost 3,500 individuals at nearly a hundred events, and a series of interviews. The fourth deals with audiences, based on an essentially quantitative survey of over 26,000 questionnaires collected at 91 performing arts festivals. Skeptics of cultural democratization won't find it all confirmation, far from it. The fifth survey shifts the focus to festival communications on social networks. It's another way of approaching the idea of social and territorial imprint, for here the territory is virtual, society distanced and brought closer together by networks, and community a real question. What kind of festival community do these networks embody? Technological utopias are put to the test. All this makes up the SOFEST project.

At the same time, the emergence of the pandemic in 2020 led the French Ministry of Culture to entrust us with a new research mission, complementary to that embodied in the SoFEST! scheme. The CEPEL team was thus assigned a mission beyond its initial spatial and temporal perimeter, involving the drawing up of a new contract originating in a Ministry subsidy, paid to France Festivals and then transferred to CEPEL for the mission for which it was responsible. For CEPEL, this involved hiring a post-doctoral student and interns, as well as remobilizing its permanent resources: two researchers, a survey technician, a cartographic engineer, and the laboratory's administrative team for the management and coordination of human resources, contracts and schedules.

While SoFEST! focused on performing arts and music, the Festivals Observation Device (DOF) corresponding to this new mission extended to all festival fields of culture: visual arts, literature, cinema and audiovisual, performing arts and music. This new survey, to be carried out 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 essentially based on a socio-economic questionnaire, the results of which will be published in autumn 2021.

The unprecedented success of our approach now obliges us to make commitments we never imagined possible on such a scale: to provide each festival (over 850) that answered all the questions with a comparative report containing data on some fifty indicators, enabling them to situate themselves within a comparative framework. We are also offering a similar table to the sixteen networks and institutions that have supported us by relaying the approach to their own festival networks.

Last but not least, the DOF approach means keeping a constant eye on the latest developments in a sector that is in a particularly tough and challenging situation. This is part of our more general mission to produce scientific knowledge that is useful to citizens and cultural players.