After the Odéon, the theater occupation movement spread throughout France

The Odéon will remain busy.

And you are no longer alone.

A week after a group of artists and other union workers settled in the emblematic Paris theater, the nerve center of the May 1968 revolution, the movement to occupy theaters to demand more aid to the sector due to the pandemic it is spread throughout France.

There are already at least seven theaters

squatted

and the unions have called this Thursday to continue and extend the protest to other theaters in the country, after rejecting the extra aid proposed in a meeting with the French government as insufficient.

They also reproach him for refusing to set a reopening date for a sector that has been completely paralyzed for more than four months.

"The theater movement continues, we call to extend it," said the general secretary of the CGT union's entertainment section, Denis Gravouil, from the Odéon after participating in the telematic meeting with the French Prime Minister, Jean Castex, and the Minister of Culture Roselyne Bachelot, who visited the Odéon last Saturday to try, unsuccessfully, to defuse a protest that has since spread to halls and theaters in Strasbourg, Nantes, Pau, Chateauroux or Saint Etienne.

Just a few hours after Bachelot described, during a speech at the National Assembly, the occupation of theaters as "useless and dangerous", some 200 people also installed this Thursday at the Théâtre de la Cité de Toulouse.

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At the meeting with the unions, the Government announced that it will mobilize an additional 20 million euros - it had already planned 30 million in this year's budget - to, among others, support the "most fragile" artistic teams such as dance and theater companies. or musical groups.

They will also serve to facilitate the reopening - as yet undated - of theaters and to "accompany" young recent graduates from the world of live entertainment who "arrive at a devastated job market."

The Executive will also increase to 17 million euros the budget dedicated this 2021 to the "emergency fund" for artists and technicians of the intermittent show - who do not work continuously throughout the year and who can collect unemployment as long as trade an annual minimum - who have not been able to benefit from the white-year device foreseen by the Government due to the pandemic until next August.

Mere "crumbs," Gravouil rejected.

The union representative recalled that the sector demands not only the withdrawal of the unemployment reform that will come into force this summer and that it affirms that it will especially harm it, but that the white year is prolonged for intermittent workers and that all of them can also benefit from this measure.

Currently, according to the artists and technicians locked up for a week in the Odéon theater, in the heart of the Latin Quarter of Paris, six out of ten people in the sector unemployed due to the coronavirus do not receive any compensation.

Like the producer Magali Moreau.

"I have been out of work for practically a year and I am in a very precarious situation," explained this live show producer who said this Thursday was willing to continue the confinement for whatever it takes.

"We are all determined to endure," said Pierre, a 62-year-old entertainment technician who did not want to give his last name and who was one of the first to occupy the theater near the Senate and the Luxembourg gardens.

“The first days we slept on the floor.

I came here with nothing, ”he says while handing a bag of dirty clothes through the gate that surrounds the theater to his wife, who from the street hands him another with clean clothes.

Theaters, cinemas and museums have been closed in France since the president, Emmanuel Macron, ordered a second lockdown at the end of October.

None of the dates managed since then for a progressive reopening —initially December 15, then January 20— has been fulfilled and the cultural sector, one of the main sources of pride in France, feels that the Government has decided to “sacrifice culture ”due to the pandemic, as stated in one of the banners placed last week on the facade of the Odéon theater.

Since then, the fifty spectacle workers locked in the building that during May 68 was also occupied for a month and became a free platform for anyone who wanted to speak during the student protest, have held concerts every day and cultural activities.

But above all, it has hosted assemblies that have brought together dozens and even hundreds of people inside and outside the doors of this building inaugurated in 1782 by Marie Antoinette as a “new temple that royal munificence has erected to the greater glory of art. dramatic".

On the eve of the meeting with the Government, the squatters of the Odéon already launched an appeal on social networks to activate the entire population in a fight, they argue that “it goes beyond the demands of the world of culture. We demand work and social protection for all ”, they claimed in a video in which they urged“ to occupy all places to re-own our future ”.