The Rise – and Blind Spots – of Dance Festivals

Laura Cappelle

Performing arts festivals are multiplying rapidly across France, with the dance world following the same trend. These short-term, crowd-pleasing events have become a vital engine for the culture sector, providing a springboard for artists and giving programmers the freedom to program bolder work. Yet for all the visibility they provide, a crowded festival calendar can sometimes mask a troubling trend: a lack of meaningful commitment to dance throughout the rest of the season.

Boom’Structur, a platform in Clermont-Ferrand dedicated to supporting emerging artists since 2013, resisted the allure of festivals for a long time. “Our goal is to support artists over longer periods,” says Sylvia Courty, co-director of the newly designated CDCN (National Choreographic Development Center). “We used to think the very dynamic of a festival was contradictory. For artists, it offers a remarkably short window to interact with audiences and organizers.” Ultimately, however, the benefits of the format – namely to show more pieces, connect with audiences and increase visibility – won them over. At the end of September, Boom’Structur inaugurated the first edition of On va tout fêter !, which featured local artists and amateur performers in several venues around Clermont-Ferrand.  

Festivals have been popping up all over France over the past twenty years. A national study recorded 7,300 festivals in 2019, compared to just 2,000 at the end of the 20th century. This “festivalization” of culture – a process initiated in the 1980s under former Minister of Culture Jack Lang – is now a widespread phenomenon spanning everything from literature to cinema. Dance has followed suit. In addition to Boom’Structur, five organizations in the Saône-et-Loire region – including three Scènes nationales (national theaters) – have joined forces this season to launch an ambitious new dance event, Z Festival, scheduled for a three-week run next May. Other festivals are expanding rapidly: the Cannes Côte d’Azur Dance Festival will shift from a biennial to an annual schedule starting this winter, and the Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales (RCI) in Seine-Saint-Denis, a department just outside Paris, has expanded its footprint across three distinct festivals.  

Since there are fewer venues dedicated exclusively to dance than to theater or music, these events fill crucial gaps. RCI director Frédérique Latu suggests that “the lack of space for dance in theaters is what triggered these independent, grassroots and local initiatives.”

Festivals have played a central role in shaping French contemporary dance since the 1970s. Didier Deschamps, a dancer at the time, remembers how Danse-à-Aix – spearheaded by Ginette Escoffier-Carrère from 1977 to 2001 – championed young dance companies, as did Montpellier Danse (1981) and the Lyon Dance Biennale (1984). “These were places where there were a lot of creations, where the art form was constantly being renewed,” Deschamps says. At the Ministry of Culture, where he was appointed general inspector for dance in 1992, festivals were highly valued for their economic impact and their ability to forge partnerships with local authorities.

Thirty years on, as many regions and cities scale back or entirely withdraw funding for the performing arts, festivals retain the power to engage local politicians. For Boom’Structur, the potential impact on a regional level proved to be a winning argument. While Clermont-Ferrand hosts numerous festivals year-round, “there was nothing for dance,” Courty emphasizes.

In Montpellier, the long-running Montpellier Danse Festival has enjoyed continuous political backing, first from Georges Frêche – the city’s mayor from 1977 to 2004 – and now from the current city leader, Michaël Delafosse. “We’re fortunate enough to have a mayor that stands behind us 100%. It’s a huge help,” says choreographer Jann Gallois, who also co-directs the Agora, the festival's home venue. Similarly, the Cannes Côte d’Azur Festival’s transition to a yearly event was driven by deputy mayor Jean-Michel Arnaud, who handled the city's cultural portfolio and doubled the event’s budget to make it happen.

In terms of programming, the intensive format of festivals allows for “more daring choices” than standard seasons, according to Deschamps, who took over as director of the Cannes festival in 2023. “It’s as if audiences are a bit more ‘forgiving’ – they are more receptive to risk-taking,” he says. For the multidisciplinary venues that partner with these events, the festival framework “allows them to program works they wouldn’t otherwise dare to – and I’m using their words here – include in their regular seasons,” Deschamps says. The risk, he notes, is that the proliferation of festivals “can sometimes hide a lack of meaningful commitment to dance during the rest of the year” on the part of some theaters.

Many programmers also view festivals as an ideal opportunity to pass on dance culture through workshops, panel discussions and other parallel events. “It saddens me a bit when festivals all line up to secure the ‘it’ choreographer of the moment, when the format itself allows them to build real buzz around discovering the contemporary dance scene,” says Serge Laurent, the director of dance and cultural programs at Van Cleef & Arpels. Since 2022, the traveling, bi-annual Dance Reflections Festival – which heads to Shanghai this fall after stops in London, New York and Seoul, among other cities – has served as an international showcase for the jewelry house’s commitment to supporting dance. “It is a celebration, a platform where we can truly talk about dance,” Laurent adds.

For organizations that lack a dedicated auditorium or the ability to program a full season, festivals also offer a rare chance to showcase the artists they support, especially in smaller cities. When Latu took over as director of the RCI – a festival born in 1995 out of the historic Bagnolet dance competition – she noticed that “the Seine-Saint-Denis department is one of the youngest in France, yet there was no dance festival specifically tailored for young audiences in the greater Paris region, despite a wealth of available shows.” Playground, which celebrates its fifth edition in November, was launched to meet that need, backed by a robust network of regional partnerships. In 2024, it was followed by Boost, a festival dedicated to urban styles.

While the sheer volume of festivals risks diluting their impact in the long run, they remain an invaluable gateway for rising talent. “They act as springboards, because programmers always travel to festivals,” says Gallois. She notes that the historic hip-hop festival Suresnes Cités Danse was a turning point in her own career. “But they can also have the opposite effect. If an artist isn’t ready, presenting a piece at a major festival can be very risky.” In Clermont-Ferrand, Courty is exercising caution: Boom’Structur’s new festival is intentionally scheduled to take place every other year “so we can take the time, the next season, to support one or several artists over a longer period.” Beyond the fleeting excitement of a festival, artists need year-round support, too.

Laura Cappelle is a Paris-based journalist and arts sociologist. An associate professor at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, she is the editor of a French-language introduction to dance history, Nouvelle Histoire de la danse en Occident (Seuil, 2020). In 2024, she co-authored its adaptation into a graphic novel (Une histoire dessinée de la danse, with Thomas Gilbert, Seuil, 2024). She is also the author of Créer des ballets au XXI^e siècle (CNRS Éditions, 2024). As a dance and theatre critic, Laura Cappelle has been a regular contributor to the Financial Times since 2010 and to the New York Times since 2017. She is also an editorial consultant for CN D Magazine.

Dance Reflections, by Van Cleef & Arpels
From October 14 to November 28 in Shanghai

Montpellier danse
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On va tout fêter !
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Rencontres internationales chorégraphiques de Seine-Saint-Denis
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Festival de danse Cannes Côte d'Azur
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Millery, E., Négrier, E. et Coursière, S. (2023).
Cartographie nationale des festivals : entre l’éphémère et le permanent, une dynamique culturelle territoriale.
Culture études, 2(2), 1-32.