“We must not close but readjust” cultural places: faced with Covid-19, the new director of the Dijon Opera Dominique Pitoiset calls to “get out of the walls” to keep “the link” with a suffering public.
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“We must not close but readjust” cultural places: faced with Covid-19, the new director of the Dijon Opera Dominique Pitoiset calls to “get out of the walls” to keep “the link” with a suffering public.
“It is an unusual exercise to arrive in post to deconstruct what has been done before”: since his arrival at the Dijon Opera in early January, the director Dominique Pitoiset cancels, postpones and postpones shows instead than to program new ones.
But “the situation is both distressing and very fascinating”, reassures the former director of the National Theater of Bordeaux in Aquitaine (from 2004 to 2013).
“Because it completely reshapes all the functionalities of places of art and culture in the community”. For the director, “by dint of being in arrow missions”, cultural spaces have taken the risk of finding themselves “above ground”, disconnected from the populations.
“The primary mission of a place of art is to be inscribed in a geography”, he believes. However, this mission has never been so relevant as in these times of “total absurdity”: “we are social animals and closing cultural spaces is to accept forms of regression”.
“We could be useful in the proximity: after free streaming, which has preserved artistic activity, art and culture have their role to play: a role of link”.
The new director of the Dijon Opera Dominique Pitoiset, January 20, 2021
JEFF PACHOUD – AFP
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Thus, the new director “does not resolve to cancel everything”. “We must not close cultural places but readjust them. The rooms are closed, so let’s get out of the walls. Let’s go elsewhere, let’s reinvest the urban space”, he says, only waiting “for sunny days to plan everything outside”.
– New circus and dance –
“We will have to react. And the opera cannot escape being resolutely in its time”. Already, the health crisis sounded the death knell for the subscription formula, “totally unsuitable” for a public which now takes its tickets at the last minute.
In addition to the drop “of about 50% in attendance” in 2020, the Dijon Opera thus sees its faithful cancel their subscriptions for this season and not take any for the next. “For the first time, we are no longer selling. We are refunding”.
And it is not the capture that will bring this audience back, believes Mr. Pitoiset. “The recording is all well and good, but these are archives. Me, I’m never moved”.
The new director of the Dijon Opera Dominique Pitoiset, January 20, 2021
JEFF PACHOUD – AFP
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In Dijon, the city where he was born 62 years ago, the director admits an additional difficulty: filling an auditorium with 1,600 seats, or twice the capacity of the Parisian Odeon theater for example. “It’s a difficult model to keep,” he confesses.
Thus, even if the finances are “in balance” and that the subsidies which form 80% of the budget are “not called into question”, the Dijon Opera must “develop audiences for different projects”.
Renowned for his eclecticism, the former director of the Dijon-Bourgogne National Theater (1996-2000) therefore intends to practice an all-out opening: to dance, and a call was made to the dancers Boris Charmatz and François Chaignaud; at the new circus, with a proposal made to choreographer Yoann Bourgeois; but also singing thanks to a partnership with the City of the voice of Vézelay (Yonne).
A successful theater and opera director, both with the classic Cyrano de Bergerac, titled Les Molière, and with the very contemporary “A Summer in Osage County” by Tracy Letts, Mr. Pitoiset will mount in early 2022 a Cosi fan tutte, by Mozart, while “opening the repertoire to other titles”, such as Offenbach, “lighter titles”, and of course the contemporary, an obligation made to Dijon by its status as a Lyric Theater of national interest.
The director thus intends not only to “keep” this label, which Dijon was feared to lose, but also to “relaunch” it.
By Loïc VENNIN / Dijon (AFP) / © 2021 AFP
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