Between competition and cooperation. Professional theatre companies in France[Entre concurrence et coopération. Les compagnies professionnelles de théâtre en France]

This text is a new edition of an article written in 2006. Among other things, it allows to ponder about questions that have already been strongly addressed and yet remained unresolved at the end of the past century, as well as on their permanence or their particular variation one or two decades later. The goal of this article is to better problematize the specificities of the way professional theatre companies work in France, as well as the structural difficulties they are currently faced with. It is built upon a study that covers 50% of the theatre companies in Ile -de- France in 2005 and another one that makes it possible to better understand the actual practices of employment and work of the people intermittently employed in the performing arts in the same period. An extension of our previous analysis on companies, it proposes to put into a socio-economic perspective these essential actors of the theatre world. The great heterogeneity of the situations of the Ile-de-France companies is combined with a constantly similar way of getting organized. Though formally under associative status, their intermittently employed staff is actually at the very heart of their project and artistic identity. More broadly, the companies, struggling as they are with the current changes in our society, are brought back to their ability to develop service relationships that take the utmost account of the people and territories to which they address themselves. As part of the artisanal sector of performing arts, whose productivity and market valuation are low, the companies are in a situation of chronic under-funding, coupled with the difficulties of micro-enterprises. Faced with the need for a permanent responsiveness, they are therefore structured according to flexible organizational arrangements that are not exempt from high precariousness. A more serene future for companies would require both profound changes in their overall socio-economic environment as well as a more cooperative and contextualized approach to their theatre practices and perhaps an internal governance to be clarified to ensure greater security for their staff.