Tourisme culturel : de la thématisation du genre en festival aux enjeux esthétiques et politiques soulevés

Abstract

Festivals offer a special temporality, markedly different from that of the everyday; likewise, the modes of audience engagement and participation that festivals encourage are unlike those of the usual seasonal programme. Given that Jean Vilar’s original project for the Avignon Festival was to offer a theatre for the people, and given, too, this festival’s enormous success since, Avignon offers a unique opportunity to examine and question the militant and social issues raised there, issues that lie beyond a festival’s usual objectives like cultural outreach or the economic stimulus of cultural tourism. Chief among these is gender. Since Reine-Prat’s bombshell report of 2006, thinking about the place of women in culture and management has intersected with gender issues at work. The search for a genuine parity that goes beyond mere gestural measures of “positive discrimination”, and deconstructing systematic patriarchal binaries so as to render fluctuating models of identity thinkable and possible are both urgent contemporary questions that find multiple modes of expression during the 2018 Avignon Festival, which was dedicated to themes of gender. While there are many of these, it is through the theme of the festival that they emerge in this case study and that the politics of the subject are reactivated, from aesthetic issues to the place of women, which is far from being resolved at a time of intersectional activism. In its multiple functions as forum, place for debate, artistic showcase, and a place for cultural practice, the festival works through these issues and highlights thereby double-binds and potential impasses, problems that lie at the very heart of the works studied here.

Keywords

• tourism
• culture
• performing arts
• dance
• gender
• feminism