Paris (AFP)

"Opera at home", "theater and sofa": in times of coronavirus, theaters have given unprecedented access to their productions thanks to streaming, while hoping that it will only be a parenthesis. But it may be long.

Theaters in France and elsewhere in Europe are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel with reopening dates, but face the great challenge of bringing spectators while respecting social distancing.

Last week, the Philharmonie de Paris showed what a concert can look like in the medium term: behind closed doors and then streamed. In total, 320,000 views, a figure "exceptional for a classical concert on the internet", according to the institution.

If the recordings are not new, it is their number and their accessibility in two months which are new.

- "Millions watching" -

Over 2.5 million Internet users have viewed ten productions from the Paris Opera; the Comédie-Française has put more than 80 shows online, including extremely rare archives such as "Ondine" by Giraudoux (1974) with a very young Isabelle Adjani.

The Théâtre de l'Odéon has broadcast a series of plays including recently "Le Roi Lear" by Shakespeare with the title role of Michel Piccoli, who died recently.

As a first observation, the streaming was a success.

"Just for + L'Ecole des femmes + (staged in 2018), a quarter of the views came from abroad. We even got a criticism from the Guardian," Stéphane Braunschweig, director of the Odeon.

"Since then, we have also subtitled + Tartuffe + and + Le Misanthrope +. Seeing the interest from abroad, we thought we had to develop the offer".

"There are millions of people watching us," said Valery Gergiev, famous conductor and general manager of the Mariinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg. "Instead of 2,000 spectators for a concert, we had hundreds of thousands of viewers," he said during an online conference organized by the annual festival "The Russian Seasons".

The English National Ballet (ENB) saw its number of Facebook and YouTube "followers" jump by 70,000; its director Tamara Rojo wants to "believe that those who did not have the courage to go to the theater may have seen their first ballet online" and that "a new audience will emerge" when the halls reopen.

The prestigious Metropolitan Opera of New York, quickly crushed by a deficit of 60 million euros and which thanked many of its employees, was one of the few theaters for which streaming was a source of revenue.

It attracted 19,000 new donors and the number of subscribers to its VOD system increased from 15,000 before the pandemic to 33,000.

Despite this digital "tsunami", we want to believe that the public is returning.

- "The emotions of a room" -

"There will be people who will be afraid at first," says Michel Franck, director general of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. "But I don't think they will desert theaters in favor of their screens" because "nothing can replace live performance. Seeing an opera on your television has nothing to do with sharing emotions with a theater" .

"The value of 'live' has become greater with this crisis," adds Manuel Brug, music critic for the German daily Die Welt. "Going to the theater is one of the last rituals" of the human being.

For Peter Gelb, director of the Met and precursor of opera performances at the cinema, "if people do not return to the theater, the live performance will not survive. The screen is a unique experience". "Without an audience, at some point, we will have nothing to film!", He told AFP.

Others are even more suspicious.

"There is a risk ... those who abuse this medium lose the public," assured the daily Kommersant Vladimir Ourine, director of the famous Bolshoi theater, which has just ended its recordings (9.5 million views) .

For Tamara Rojo, the experience will leave its mark.

"The captions were mainly marketing, but we are investing to create better digital content," she said. In the future, "a show can have two lives, one in the theater and another very different digital".

In Los Angeles, choreographer Benjamin Millepied launched a paid digital platform with protean content, for ten dollars a month.

Charging or not: subsidized European theaters for the most part refuse, unlike American theaters.

According to Vincent Agrech, producer and critic for Diapason, "theaters maintain free admission for fear of losing contact with the public".

"However, this + open bar + of free retransmissions has made some artists cringe", who cede their rights free of charge or receive symbolic sums.

According to him, this model risks "generating bad practices" because "the gratuitousness has a downgrading side for artistic work".

Will the spectator go back to the ticket office?

"Some people risk losing the reflex to go to the theater, others will on the contrary binge on shows", according to Vincent Agrech.

"The two will coexist. Who will prevail? It is still difficult to say."

© 2020 AFP