The Future of Festivals: A Symposium

We had an inspiring day hosting The Future of Festivals on Wednesday 29th with the Jerwood Charitable Foundation at the beautiful Southbank Centre. The day was an insightful mix of debate and discussion with artists and festival-makers about the value and challenges facing festivals today.

We'll be uploading video clips and audio podcasts of the event in the next week. But if you can't wait for that, you can view some of the debate and discussion on twitter under the hashtag  #TFOF. 
 

The last decade has seen a rapid growth in the number and popularity of arts festivals in the UK. No longer is the UK arts festival calendar solely dominated by Edinburgh: from Spring to Autumn across the UK there are increasingly popular grass roots festivals that celebrate local culture, large-scale music festivals that now include theatre and dance programmes, new city-wide festivals that promote place-making and civic identity and mainstream cultural institutions wrapping up their existing programme within a festival format. And in addition we are also witnessing the rise of a new type of arts festival led and programmed by artists.

Many of these festivals emerged and grew in the economic boom of the last decade, fuelled by public sector spending, corporate sponsorship and the disposable income of audiences. Now, in different economic times, how many will survive? What strategies will festival organisers need to adopt to make themselves more sustainable? Are there now opportunities for new, more collaborative festival models? What unique role do festivals play in the development of an artist’s career? LIFT and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation invite you to join us for a day of dialogue and networking with festival directors, producers, theatre makers, artists and policy makers to explore these questions.

Keynote speakers:

Jude Kelly Artistic Director of The Southbank Centre   

Simon Mellor Executive Director, Manchester International Festival and newly appointed Executive Director, Arts at Arts Council England.  

Key contributors:

Mark Yeoman Director of the Noordezoon Festival in Groningen in The Netherlands, one of Europe's most innovative and popular performing arts festivals

Stefan Kaegi Co-founder of the German performance collective Rimini Protokoll who recently established 'Parallel Cities', a mobile artist led festival taking place in cities across the world

Andy Field co-Director of Forest Fringe at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Faith Liddell Director of Festivals Edinburgh, a new organisation working on behalf of Edinburgh's major festivals

Jennifer Cleary Head of Creative Learning, Manchester International Festival

And including a new, especially commissioned performance by Tim Etchells Artistic Director of Forced Entertainment