En 1993 already, [les metteurs en scène] Patrice Chéreau [1944-2013]Bernard Sobel, Jean-Pierre Vincent [1942-2020] and Alain Crombecque [(1939-2009) ancien directeur du Festival d’Avignon] signed an open letter when a 5% reduction was announced, after successive budget reductions. They expressed their concerns, writing in particular: “Consideration of the role reserved for artistic practices in this incessant struggle between barbarism and civilization is one of the criteria by which we judge a society, a government. »
The evil is old, of course, but the situation then did not have the desperate character that it has today. Indeed, there has not been a week in months where we have not read alarming articles on the situation of theaters in France.
The entire pyramid of creative teams is concerned, from national theaters to companies – creative teams for theater, dance, music, circus, etc., which are most of the time without a fixed location
of implantation. And let’s not fall into the trap of pitting one against the other because, in any case, it is indeed all the actors, technicians, authors, directors, etc., who will be reduced to inactivity. Each sector needs the other.
Scheduled dismantling
Recently, in order supposedly to reduce the nation’s deficit, 200 million euros were cut from the small budget of the Ministry of Culture which could see even more significant reductions in 2025. This situation opens up an unprecedented future crisis. Choosing the weakening, the putting into dormancy of a number of places, even the disappearance of the most fragile companies, the politician accelerates the fact that the world is unraveling.
To try to create commonality again, we need debates, confrontations of ideas and sensitive spaces which fictions carry by offering us access to others. These confrontations are necessary and stimulating in any society with the ambition to be a democracy. Have the spokespersons of the most reactionary discourses definitively imposed their “cultural hegemony”?
If this situation continues, it could only be the first step in a planned dismantling. Once the means granted to creation have been cut, it will then be easy to declare that, from the places of creation to the companies, none are fulfilling their mission and therefore, in a second step, to further reduce the means.
And all the more easily since voices will not fail to be raised to say that certain private companies, which do almost without subsidies, are able to put on shows which reach a large audience. Are we going to destroy this heritage of cultural decentralization, which, despite some occasional dysfunctions, is envied all over the world?
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