Media education

The Festival d'Avignon has an international influence. With 600 accredited journalists and a press review of more than 10 volumes each edition, it is an extremely high-profile event. If audience studies have indicated that the press remains a prescriber, they also indicate that traditional formats are no longer the formats of the new generations. Children, teenagers and young adults are highly connected and linked to new media.

Through this digital appetite, the Festival wishes to develop a taste for the performing arts, to help them decipher the information that overwhelms them and to suggest that they produce and therefore be active and critical in order to enjoy going to the theatres.

Beyond learning about the performing arts through the prism of new media, the objectives are numerous. It is a question of making other voices and thoughts heard, of encouraging oral expression capacities, the management of emotions and listening through the sensitive involvement and confrontation with others that they provoke, or learning to construct a critical return on the shows.

This media education and new media thinking are at the heart of 4 flagship projects:

• Web Radio

• Web Tv - Young culture reporters

• À la jeunesse les micros

• Between journalism and culture, I choose both!

The Festival d'Avignon joins forces with Radio France Internationale (RFI) and the Association VOLT Par l'image et le son to offer web-radio workshops to young people who wish to discover the profession of radio journalist. Through the exploration of live performances and the audiovisual professions, the participants learn to speak and to understand the world around them in a sensitive way. Immersed in live conditions, they produce a programme during the Festival. During the Festival, the group, accompanied by Lucie Bouteloup, a journalist from RFI, works on writing and producing a radio programme based on a Festival show they have attended.

This collective work then leads to a radio interview built and conducted by the young people with the artistic team of the show in professional conditions, in the heart of the RFI studio installed in Avignon during the Festival.

The project is organised in two stages:

• Before the Festival :

• Discovery of the Avignon Festival and the cultural environment of Avignon,

• meeting about journalistic jobs,

• micro-trottoir organised by the VOLT Par l'image et le son team.

During the festival :

• Radio presentation workshop with Lucie Bouteloup,

• performances,

• preparatory workshop for the recording with Lucie Bouteloup

• recording of the show at the RFI studio with Radio France Internationale and the association VOLT Par l'image et le son.

Web radio programmes since 2021

2022 : Flesh by Sophie Linsmaux ans Aurelio Mergola

2022 : Silent Legacy by Maud Le Pladec and Jr Maddripp

2021 : Pinochio(s) Live #2

2021 : Kingdom by Anne-Cécile Vandalem

The Young culture reporters in Avignon project, set up by the Festival d'Avignon and the Ceméa since 2014, offers young Avignon residents the opportunity to become familiar with digital technology, the Festival and their city. On the programme of this immersion, supervised by professional journalists and Ceméa facilitators:

• Discovering the Festival through its programming and its jobs, editorial committee, filming on location, practicing interviews, editing and encoding.

• Learning to understand, practising criticism, defining a point of view are some of the major stages of teamwork.

Each week tells a little more about the collective intelligence and power of the artistic gesture.

Find all the videos of the Young Culture Reporters project - Web-TV

The Festival d'Avignon joins Making Waves to offer young people from all over France the opportunity to discover the environment of the performing arts and to be trained in radio and interview techniques. A radio studio is set up at the Avignon Festival and these young people, trained by professionals, host and produce programmes. The aim is for this radio station to be a place of encounter, transmission and diversity so that these young people can talk to artists, creators and thinkers together, using their own words, their own sensibilities, their own questions and their own utopias. The young people take part in the project via workcamps and are paid in the summer. In Avignon, young people on civic service with the AFEV (Association de la Fondation Étudiante pour la Ville) will take part in the project.

Between February and June, the group will be trained in radio practice with the Making Waves team, as well as in the discovery of the Avignon Festival with the public relations team.

Several events are organised during the year:

• Meetings and training courses from 2 to 5 consecutive days with Making Waves.

• Voice and body workshops with artists.

• Visits to emblematic Festival sites with the Festival d'Avignon team.

To conclude the project, during the Festival, the group will produce radio programmes in the Café des idées at the Cloître Saint-Louis, the heart of the Festival. Listen to them from 10 to 20 July at the 78th Festival d'Avignon!

Find all the broadcasts here.

This is a project between the Festival d'Avignon - field of unlimited "subjects" - and the press in order to make the new generation of journalists aware of the performing arts, to work on the promotion of the "cultural press" and on the renewal of audiences and spectators.

This project is renewed in 2024 thanks to the involvement of the editorial staff in printed supplements dedicated to each edition, to the important presence of the press (600 accredited journalists in July) and to the support work of our press office each summer with the new generations of journalists.

The Festival d'Avignon proposes to journalism students a course composed of :

• From 2 to 6 April 2024: seminar on the Festival, its organisation, the performing arts and cultural journalism. Supervised by Marie-Josée Sirach, cultural journalist and theatre critic, in collaboration with journalists from the partner media. Meetings with cultural professionals and discovery of the cultural environment.

• From 29 June to 21 July 2024: work placement in the editorial department of a media partner of the Festival d'Avignon.

Requirements: open to students at journalism schools or higher education establishments interested in cultural journalism.

In 2024, the media currently partnering the Festival are : Les Echos, Les Inrockuptibles, L'Humanité, Théâtre(s), Zébuline.

Deadline for applications: 15 February 2024