SHOULD THE AMERICAN THEATER TAKE FRENCH LESSONS?
Les artistes de Broadway devraient-il s'inspirer des Français ?
Should the American theatre take French lessons?
Manifestation des intermittents du spectacle : qu’en pensent les Américains ?
Ces dernières semaines, de nombreux intermittents du spectacle et étudiants en théâtre français ont protesté contre le maintien de la fermeture des établissements culturels. Ce journaliste du New York Times a observé ces revendications. Dans cet article, il constate les importantes différences de perception de l'art entre nos deux pays. Est-il temps pour les Américains de prendre la culture plus au sérieux ?
The only march you’re likely to see on Broadway this year is the kind with trombones in The Music Man. Which is why the news last week that thousands of protesters were marching in France to demand the reopening of theaters there seemed so difficult to comprehend here.
2. The French were not merely marching. Dozens of protesters also forced their way into playhouses across the country to demand that cultural institutions be treated like other businesses, some of which have been allowed to reopen.
3. Also on their agenda: an extension of tax breaks for freelance arts workers, or “travailleurs d’art.” That the phrase “arts workers” (let alone “national theaters”) barely registers in American English is part of a bigger problem here.
4. The pandemic has been a disaster for the performing arts industry. The French protesters frame art-making as a matter of both liberty and labor. They see themselves as front-line workers; one of the signs they carried read, “Opening essential.”
5. Here, the unions representing actors and other theater workers make the opposite argument: They worry that a reopening would expose their members to unacceptable risk. But if the specific motivation for the French protests seems unpopular here, the underlying assumptions about art are ones Americans should heed. Begin with how we look at our theater and how it looks at itself.
RESPECTING THE ARTS
6. Even when producing work that becomes a part of the national conversation in the US — Hamilton, Slave Play, the Public Theater’s Trump-alike Julius Caesar — our musicals and dramas are too often seen as inconsequential entertainment. Behind this is a strain of prejudices that see cultural work as a species of child’s play or worse.
7. There is no tradition in the United States, as there is in France, of treating artists as skilled laborers, deserving of the same respect and protections provided to those who work in other fields.
8. The U.S. governmental support for the arts remains a pittance. Cultural spending per capita in France is about 10 times that in the United States. Ours is a country that treasures its cultural heritage without wanting to support the labor that maintains it.
9. Perhaps that’s changing, if less dramatically than in France. Although the pandemic has left many theater artists without work the relief bill President Joe Biden signed recently included $470 million in emergency support for arts and cultural institutions.
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