Resources

The Festival d’Avignon actively promotes artistic and cultural education through its teaching service, moments of practice (workshops, visits…), teaching material made available online, and training seminars, all of which are available to educational teams and teachers.

RESOURCES: EDUCATIONAL SERVICES, TRAINING, AND TEACHING MATERIAL © DR

Team and Educational service

The Délégation académique à l’action culturelle (Daac) of the Aix-Marseille regional education authority created an educational service within the framework of the Festival d’Avignon in the spring of 2016. Headed by a teacher, its goal is to help other teachers create artistic and cultural programmes.

This service allows teachers to become partners of the Festival, to help build projects aimed at students and to make teaching documents and syllabi more widely available.

Education Department - Christelle Racine, relay teacher working with the Festival d'Avignon

Lucie Hass, Head of publics relations

Camille Cousy, public relations

Public relations department

Visits

Visiting the history of the Festival

Getting to peer behind the scenes is always a favourite moment for audiences. It gives them the opportunity to see what goes on backstage and to experience the performing arts more deeply. The Festival d’Avignon has many magnificent open-air venues, which invite audiences to approach the space of the stage from a different angle and to (re)discover the architectural heritage of Avignon. Throughout the year, the Festival offers visits to various groups of spectators (students, associations, works councils), in order to explain the history of the event, but also its organisation before and during the Festival.

Training

The Festival d’Avignon also helps train teachers and youth workers as part of its youth-oriented programmes. Whether part of pre-existing programmes or the result of outside propositions, those times of training aim to make clearer what the Festival d’Avignon is (its history, its venues, its relationship to the city, to the world, and to the political sphere), but also to present artistic disciplines and projects having to do with national, academic, or regional policies. By giving teachers and youth workers new skills, those training sessions contribute to the construction of courses and syllabi for students and youths and take part in an ongoing reflection on the coordination of teaching and educational actions.

Examples of key moments

  • Preparation of the play Ahmed’s return… for kids by Didier Galas, with theatre workshop, presentation of the training guide, meeting with the director, and rehearsal in October and November 2018,

  • Preparation of the syllabus of the Theatre Baccalauréat (2017-2019): Les Illusions comiques by Olivier Py, with three regional education authorities (Aix-Marseille, Nice, and Montpellier), 30 November 2016 at the FabricA for 50 teachers and 100 students, and nationally on 26 March 2017 at the Théâtre de la Ville,

  • Discovering the Festival, its actions and partnerships, by teachers taking part in the Lycéens en Avignon programme,

  • Shows, encounters, and collective analyses, during each edition of the Festival d’Avignon, organised by the ANRAT with about forty teachers,

  • Shows, encounters, and collective analyses, during each edition of the Festival d’Avignon, organised by the Ceméa with about fifteen teachers, directors of public relations, mediators, and regional culture counselors,

  • Youth work qualification internship, in partnership with the Ceméa, focusing on cultural activities and supervision.

Training Guides

Pièces (dé)montées training guides

Canopé, the creation and education supervision network, produces every year the Pièces (dé)montées training guides, which help young spectators better understand the shows they watch. Every edition, several Pièces (dé)montées are produced and made available to download on the Festival’s website. To better understand the event and its history, a special Pièce (dé)montée guide about the Festival d’Avignon gives teachers and youth workers access to a synthetic educational document.

Digital Education Platform

Canopé also publishes a digital platform Théâtre en acte, with files concerning the new Baccalauréat Théâtre numérique, to accompany students in their research on the works. Discover the files onLove Triumphant, Le Tartuffe.

Festival Experiences

Do you want to rewatch your favourite shows, discover new ones, get to know an artist through his practice, or delve into the memory of one of the most famous performing arts events in the world? Do you want to be able to join the community of the Festival d’Avignon at any time, from any place? Since 2014, the Festival has set up many online projects to make its contents available, explore new territories, and meet new audiences. With its FXP Festival Expériences branch, funded by the Banque des Territoires de la Caisse des dépôts et consignations and the Groupe Fiminco, the Festival d’Avignon is now equipped with a new medium whose goal is to develop its digital offer and to better showcase its audiovisual assets. This company, founded according to values of general interest and public service, offers to share new experiences of the Festival with its audience, but also with new user-spectators. Soon, Art Classes and live recordings of the Festival d’Avignon, many of them unknown or so far unavailable, will be made available online, along with context and commentary.

Festival Experiences' website