DOF

Festival Viewing Device

Partners: Ministry of Culture, France Festival.

CEPEL Amount: 42,000€

Summary:

The festival ecosystem—the context in which this dual impact occurs—requires conducting several simultaneous studies that complement and reinforce one another. The first addresses economic and social aspects. The second explores the themes of cooperation and partnerships, which constitute part of this dual socio-territorial impact. It raises the question of the substance and limits of what some are proclaiming—perhaps a bit too hastily—as the advent of the cooperative paradigm. The third investigation addresses the issue of volunteers, who were the subject of a two-pronged methodological approach: a questionnaire survey of nearly 3,500 individuals across nearly 100 events, and a series of interviews. The fourth study focuses on audiences, based on a primarily quantitative survey and the collection of more than 26,000 questionnaires gathered at 91 performing arts festivals. Skeptics of cultural democratization will not find only confirmation here—far from it. The fifth study shifts the focus to festivals’ communication on social media. This is another way of approaching the idea of social and territorial impact, because here the territory is virtual, society is both distanced and brought closer together by networks, and community is a real issue. Which 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, one that complemented the mission embodied by the SoFEST! initiative. The CEPEL team was therefore tasked with work extending beyond its initial spatial and temporal scope, which involved drafting a new contract funded by a grant from the Ministry, paid to France Festivals, and then transferred to CEPEL for the mission it was responsible for. For CEPEL, this entailed hiring a postdoctoral researcher and interns, as well as redeploying its permanent staff: two researchers, a data processing technician, a mapping engineer, and finally the laboratory’s administrative team to handle all aspects of human resources, contract management, and scheduling.

While SoFEST! focused on the performing arts and music, the Festival Observation System (DOF), established to fulfill this new mission, was expanded to cover all cultural festival sectors: visual arts, literature, film and audiovisual arts, the performing arts, and music. This new survey, conducted in 2021 among 1,400 festivals across all these fields, was first presented at the États Généraux des Festivals in Bourges on June 28, 2021. It was primarily based 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 we never imagined would reach such a scale: providing each festival (more than 850) that answered all the questions with a comparative data report based on some 50 indicators, allowing them to assess their performance within a comparative framework. Similarly, we provide a similar table to the sixteen networks and institutions that have supported us by promoting the initiative within their own networks of festivals.

Finally, a key feature of the DOF approach is its constant monitoring of developments in a sector facing particularly challenging and complex circumstances. This is central to our broader mission of producing scientific knowledge that is useful to citizens and cultural stakeholders.