The Festival d'Avignon stands as one of the most significant events in the global performing arts scene, boasting over 2,000 performances by companies worldwide since its inception in 1947. Positioned at the heart of contemporary performing arts, it annually attracts thousands of spectators and hundreds of450 journalists. This renowned festival has been instrumental in showcasing and revealing essential artists post-WWII, spanning not only theatre but also dance, performance, and circus arts: Mnouchkine, Brook, Wilson, Chéreau, Bausch, Ostermeier, Castellucci, Marthaler, De Kersmaecker, Rizzo, Cassiers, Forsythe, Cunningham, Nadj, The Living Theatre, Abramovic... In 2005, the "Avignon quarrel" illuminated the festival's role in reflecting major aesthetic shifts, notably the rise of "postdramatic theatre" (Lehmann 2006).In 2005, the "Querelle d'Avignon", which pitted the defenders of text-based and image-based theater against each other, as well as avant-garde and popular theater, highlighted the festival's role in reflecting on major aesthetic changes, and in particular the emergence of a "postdramatic theater", to use Lehmann 2006's expression. Our corpus of digital traces is sourced from both public and private collections:
- → The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) preserves the heritage of the Festival d'Avignon : programs, photographs, video recordings, reviews, web pages have been collected as well as special collections from the different festival organizers.
- → The Institut national de l’Audiovisuel (INA) serves as a repository for French audiovisual heritage, including recordings of festival performances aired on television news. Their archive boasts over 6,000 video documents related to the Festival d'Avignon.
- → The Christophe Raynaud de Lage photographs collection features the work of the festival's official photographer since 2005, with a digital archive exceeding 300,000 images.
- → To analyze the creative process behind contemporary mises en scène, the STAGE team will collect digital traces from artists, encompassing cloud repositories, emails, websites, and offline sources like hard drives and paper documents. Two directions will be explored: gathering digital traces from works already created and works created during the research program. We will focus our study on 15 creative processes.
In the project's next phase, we aim to expand our dataset to include additional contemporary theatre data. We welcome contributions of performing arts programs, photographs, and video recordings. Please reach out to us for further collaboration.