12 Million Euros Saved by Reusing Stage Sets at Avignon Festival

Inside La FabricA’s stock

La FabricA, the Festival d’Avignon construction workshop on the Île Piot, opened in 2013 with enough floor area to assemble several full productions side by side. Its racks hold the usable remains of earlier summers: wall sections, frames, stair units and platforms that have stood in the Cour d’honneur, the Cloître des Célestins or a venue at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon.

Reuse saves money only when it cancels a rebuild. Pulling a unit off a rack costs something too, because the piece has to be stored, checked, adapted and carried to the stage. Making the same unit again means carpenter-days, timber, steel and a lorry. Most of the festival’s reported 12 million euros sits in the gap between those two routes.

Material prices after 2020 widened the gap. In France, a standard plywood sheet of 2.5 m by 1.25 m roughly doubled in price between 2019 and the peak years of 2020 to 2023. One set wall 8 m wide and 6 m high can swallow around 20 sheets before anyone counts framing, bracing or paint. Across an edition carrying 30 to 40 productions, plywood and framing stock alone can push the summer material bill into six figures.

Trimming, reinforcement, a new skin, fresh paint, a safety check: that is the usual list before a stored panel goes back on a stage. The work adds up to less than a full rebuild, though it still has to be booked as carpenter-days and squeezed into a workshop schedule that is already building new scenery. Whether reuse pays is settled piece by piece, in those hours.

Relative humidity in the Vaucluse swings widely between July and January, and plywood left in damp air can delaminate at the edges over a single season. So the depots run dehumidifiers and stack panels on edge with air gaps, using floor space that could have held another unit. A panel that is stored badly comes back once, if at all.

Insurers read stored scenery as a fire load. A depot holding several hundred cubic metres of timber, fabric and foam needs sprinkler coverage, separation distances and a valuation based on replacement cost, which turns into a fixed annual expense. A smaller company has fewer productions across which to spread it. Rent, dehumidification and insurance are real outgoings at Avignon as well, with the depots sitting beside the workshop instead of in a separate commercial facility. The 12 million is therefore a net figure, paid storage set against construction that was never ordered.

The saving starts in design meetings long before an audience sees anything. Roughly 18 months ahead of opening, designers and builders need to know whether a wall will use braced panels on standard bolt patterns. A unit made that way can be re-cut, re-skinned and stiffened for another stage. A carved, glued, highly specific object may reach the end of its usefulness when the production closes. The move into a permanent building in 2013 changed what designers could assume: if a piece has a reasonable chance of surviving the season, the workshop can build it with later use already in mind, and that expectation shows up in the drawing before it shows up in a budget line.

None of it works without a searchable catalogue carrying dimensions, load ratings and photographs. Without one, designers specify new builds because they cannot know what already exists. The festival keeps that catalogue inside the workshop, and the labour spent maintaining it is one reason the physical stock stays usable.

A set also belongs to a scenographer’s design, so reuse generally waits until the production that commissioned it has closed. Sets from shows still touring stay out of the pool, which leaves the available stock leaning toward work that has ended. What is in the pool then feeds back into the next commission: a designer who knows the depot holds 40 braced panels at 2.5 m may draw around those panels.

What the 12 million euros counts

The figure gathers avoided construction, avoided transport and avoided disposal across recent editions, including costs that never appeared as budget lines. Carpentry labour, raw timber and steel, and trucking between workshop and venues carry most of the weight.

Projection stores lightly, then costs during the run

A four-projector mapping rig fits into two flight cases. Media servers from Disguise, laser projectors from Barco and Epson, and the reflective foil setups used for stage apparitions can travel in a van and move on to the next city. None of that gear needs a 400 square metre depot or winter dehumidification.

The expense moves into the performance weeks instead. High-output laser projectors draw current every night they run, and a mapped stage using four of them adds servers, cooling and crew to the daily operating line. A painted flat carries maintenance and handling costs, but it takes nothing from the mains. Rental houses in Lyon and Marseille price a mid-tier mapping package by the week, and over a six-week Avignon run that hire can exceed the build cost of the scenery it replaced. The storage burden shrinks; the risk relocates into hire duration, technical support and electricity.

Holography sits at the expensive end of the exchange. The foil technique needs fixed stage geometry, controlled lighting and a performer rehearsed to the centimetre. Once those conditions are met, the production gains an image that packs down cleanly, with less of the freedom that physical scenery gives a director and designer.

Film festivals carry a lighter version of the same logistics. The Sundance Institute ships drives and DCPs to Park City, and its 2021 hybrid edition moved much of the programme through a streaming platform with no physical stage build at all. Theatre scenery stays an object that has to be carried, insured and stored.

The museum afterlife of a set

Scenery leaving the active inventory does not automatically go to landfill. The Atelier des Lumières in Paris, operated by Culturespaces since 2018, fills a former foundry with projection-mapped exhibitions built from digital assets, and the same production pipeline can absorb scanned set geometry from a theatre source. A designer’s 1:20 model can be photographed and processed into a point cloud, then used as projection material that costs nothing to keep as a physical object, long after the stage version has been dismantled or repurposed.

Physical pieces circulate as well. Costume and set elements from Avignon productions have appeared in regional exhibition contexts, and the Collection Lambert in Avignon has shown theatre-adjacent installation work. There the economics invert: the museum pays for climate control, mounting and interpretation, and the object has to hold its condition across an exhibition run measured in months.

Immersive formats have made the digital version profitable for some operators, since one asset library can feed a projection-led show in Lisbon, Seoul and New York. The cost of that is repetition, the same moving wall of light arriving in market after market.

What the number leaves outside

The reported saving omits the warehouse itself, which the festival owns, and the administrative labour of cataloguing. It also omits the carbon accounting a full lifecycle assessment would produce, since avoided timber does not automatically mean avoided emissions once transport and treatment are counted.

Companies touring across borders meet a harsher version of the same arithmetic. Customs paperwork, divergent fire regulations and transport costs can consume the saving from a rebuild, and a set built around one director’s sightlines tends to resist another production’s needs unless the sharpness of the first design is sacrificed.

Meanwhile the panels keep moving: re-cut, re-skinned, marked in the workshop catalogue, checked against shows still on the road, returned to the rack. After the fourth of those passes, with new skins, new bolt holes and a new stage geometry, it is unclear whose design the thing still is, and nobody at Avignon seems to have had to answer that in writing.