Le festival Sigma de Bordeaux (1965-1990)

The Sigma festival of Bordeaux (1965-1990), Françoise Taliano-des Garets. On its creation in 1965, Sigma was a protest festival which welcomed avant-garde theater and music. Intended to shock the Bordeaux bourgeois, this yearly manifestation was also an instrument of the Bordeaux municipality's cultural policy. The rise of its mayor, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, to the position of Prime Minister, helped the festival to secure its audience and its financial solidity, but it was also the beginning of its decline. The Sigma case raises the problem of the ageing of an avant-garde festival in a municipal stronghold whose most important official was understood that culture could serve his national political image.Taliano-des Garets Françoise. Le festival Sigma de Bordeaux (1965-1990). In: Vingtième Siècle, revue d'histoire, n°36, octobre-décembre 1992. Dossier : Identités d'Europe Centrale après le communisme. pp. 43-52