Visualizing a Theater Festival: The Case of Avignon’s OFF Festival
Résumé
Theater performances are ephemeral events that bring together different people—spectators, artists, producers, and technicians—in a specific place and at a specific time. At the end of a performance, few physical traces remain: costumes, scenic objects, a script, images, and, in some cases, videos, as well as—most often—a program. Theater scholars, in addition to their personal experience as spectators or collaborators of a show, use these few material traces to write the stories of people, works, performances, places, and institutions. Today, these traces are often also digital or digitized. However, theater performances are also dynamic events. A performance travels to different locations, artists are influenced by their past collaborations or new encounters, and new genres, themes, and practices emerge over time. This is where data and digital methods come into play. The large amount of digital data now available means that methods developed in the field of Digital Humanities can also apply to theater studies, in order to reveal previously unseen patterns and trends, or provide evidence to support existing hypotheses. Drawing on the programs of the Festival OFF d’Avignon, this presentation aims to highlight the value of programs as a rich and “raw” source for theater history, prior to any standardisation—for instance, in the names and categories used by formal archival systems. Specifically, this study seeks to: a) explore the types of questions that a quantitative approach in theater studies can raise and, b) show how festival data and programs can be used to study the evolution of the genres used to describe the OFF festival’s performances.