Festivals in Dialogue: Innovative Planning for a Sustainable Future featuring the Association of Performing Arts Professionals, USA (APAP), the Manchester International Festival, and the Sibiu International Theatre Festival, Romania (FITS)

In the face of evolving challenges, the performing arts industry urgently needs innovative management strategies driven by a vision that prioritizes accessibility through entrepreneurial planning and sustainability. This conversation brings together cultural makers from leading institutions, including the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP), the Manchester International Festival (MIF), and the Sibiu International Theatre Festival (FITS).

The panelists have provided unique perspectives on innovation in existing practices to enhance inclusivity, foster collaborative thinking, and ensure a sustainable future for the arts. The panel discussion was showcased in the official program as Festivals in Dialogue: Innovative Planning for a Sustainable Future. 

Panelists:

Cosmin Chivu: We had an amazing, wonderful day yesterday, the first day of the performing arts market, and today it's only going to get better because we begin this morning with a distinguished panel. You will hear a lot about their work, their challenges, and hopefully about the future of performing arts in this very difficult time. As we know, the world is going through a lot of issues and challenges. Please allow me to introduce our panelists: Kee Hong Low, Creative Director of Factory International and the Manchester International Festival (MIF), Lisa Richards Toney, President and CEO of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP), Constantin Chiriac, president of FITS and Vicențiu Rahău, Curator and Indoor Event Coordinator of the Sibiu International Theatre Festival (FITS).

Before we take our conversation to the needs and urgency in prioritizing accessibility and inclusivity through entrepreneurial planning, I would like to ask each of you, in a couple of words—though I know it's an impossible task—for our participants who are here in the room and online, to share what your festival or organization does and your responsibilities within the organization. 

Kee Hong Low: Thank you very much. It's nice to be here in Sibiu and get straight to it. We started as the Manchester International Festival in 2007, a festival of only new commissions of large-scale work, and since last October, we opened our permanent building named Aviva Studios because of a lovely partnership with Aviva. We now program all year round. Together with the artistic director and CEO, John McGrath, myself and John are often responsible for the programming of the organization, but I will also direct the festival from 2025. 

Lisa Richards Toney: I'm Lisa Richards Toney, President and CEO of APAP. APAP is a long-standing institution; we've been around for probably close to 75 years. We are the national membership organization focused on advocacy and serving the presenting, booking, and touring industry for North America. Most people know us through our conference, which happens every January in New York City, where we host thousands of our member organizations and individuals as they finalize business and the booking cycle for the following year. We do lots of things in addition to our conference: we have professional development workshops throughout the year. As I mentioned, advocacy is a big focus of what we do, ensuring that the needs of this industry, not just our members, but the field itself, are well served and understood. 

Harold David: Sorry for my English, as I am not a native speaker, but I will try my best. I'm the co-chairman of the Festival d'Avignon, which is also a long-standing institution in France, having been created in 1966. It's now the most important festival in France as an open-access festival with 1,666 shows presented during three weeks. It's a very important place for presenting creations, with 400 of these shows being new creations that have never been presented anywhere in the world before Avignon. This festival is now developing its international audience and trying to become a marketplace as a new performing arts market. This year, we have about 200 companies coming from abroad, a significant number relative to the total number of companies. We're trying to develop this into being one of the right places for international programmers and buyers, managing to spread this quantity of shows all over the world. 

Constantin Chiriac: I agreed 31 years ago to start this festival after the revolution, thinking about the best way to link a community or country through dialogue between artists, producers, actors, and all the people who work together to create a miracle for the spectators. We started the festival with three countries and eight shows, and this year we have 82 countries sending more than 5,000 artists. We are playing in 82 different venues, presenting 830 shows, events, and so on, all very carefully selected. We have grown the festival over the years in response to the community, the country, and the world. Because of that, we developed the performing arts market in 1997. In the same year, we started the theater school and theater studies at the university. In 2000, we expanded the studies with culture management, and in 2004, we changed the theater I lead, which is a Romanian and German theater belonging to the community. I fought to ensure it was not a national theater under the Ministry of Culture, unlike the six national theaters in Bucharest. I believed it was important to be directly linked with the community, not with the political structure in the capital of Romania. So, it's the only theater belonging to the community.

After that, we developed the European Capital of Culture in 2007, and we also built a platform for universities in PhD studies coming from that situation, not only in Romania but all around the world. What does a PhD in theater and performing arts studies mean? Usually, we are producing, in the best case, 40-50 books, mixing them, and often having new books that end up forgotten in libraries. So, we decided to issue a challenge together with 47 universities from all over the world: what does it mean to take a practical task, conduct research, and then have the power to theoretically disseminate it? At the same time, looking at the community, this city was never conquered. I was not born in this city, and I asked, what can you do to open the doors of this city? So it is the only city conquered by artists. This year, we hosted 70 prominent personalities from around the world, including Peter Brook, Peter Stein, Eugenio Barba, and many others. We already have 30 significant personalities, and the idea to honor them with a star was to bring their shows to the city while also developing a research platform with universities. This year, we are fortunate to build a research institute within the Romanian Academy with private money, not state money. We have real independence in what we do.

We have received the rights from all these personalities to use their work for educational and research purposes, which is crucial for undertaking significant projects at this institute, not only with master’s students but also with universities and the younger generation. We also developed a volunteer program, and each year we have around 15,000 applicants from all over the world, selecting 500 to assist with the festival. This experience is a valuable learning opportunity, helping them understand the festival's operations and the preferences of the new generation.

In conclusion, I want to express my happiness at seeing so many distinguished personalities here and in the audience. I hope this dialogue will foster a sustainable and prosperous future for our communities. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Cosmin Chivu: Yes, my question today is how the FITS festival is different from what it was, and we have heard a lot about its evolution. How do you feel today compared to last year, and how has your job changed or adapted this year compared to previous years?

Vicențiu Rahău: Good morning. I think there are two aspects. What Constantin Chiriac mentioned regarding the festival is progressing, and there is another significant section, Therme Forum, because I believe the festival's role is to facilitate meetings with experts from other fields related to performing arts. This includes architecture and sciences because we need to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue and learn from outside our field. Another aspect is the importance of planning, especially for overseas companies. We need to present their performances in Europe consecutively to avoid logistical issues. It is essential to think on a European level about how we can efficiently showcase important or new works.

Cosmin Chivu: About four years ago, the world had a wake-up call. It was not much different from previous experiences, but it was a moment when we said enough is enough; we cannot continue as we were. This moment was marked by the murder of George Floyd. The movement that arose from this tragedy was not just a wake-up call for the United States but became a global movement. Artists around the world realized that from a financial perspective, the world lost a lot of money because it was not diversified culturally, financially, psychologically, socially, politically, and on all levels. The movement became important from that point on.

And I will ask my next question to everyone on the panel: how do you manage the need for diversity, the need for inclusivity while balancing artistic integrity and commercial viability? In many ways, commercial viability plays against artistic integrity, which must include diversity. I will kindly ask Lisa to begin this because I think you've experienced firsthand in the United States the need and the change, as you became the CEO of APAP in 2020, around the same time the world was dealing with COVID and the extraordinary movement that arose from that extraordinary tragedy.

Lisa Richards Toney: Happy to start the conversation. I did become president and CEO of APAP. I actually started in June 2020, which is when the murder of George Floyd happened. My predecessor was still there, and we were working together, Mario Garcia Durham and I. The first task that I had was: are you going to respond? Are you going to send a note to the membership about our stance on this horrible issue? I watched the dialogue happen with our board of directors. I had already accepted the job. My start date was technically July 1st, so this was June. I was consulting technically, and I remember the internal process that I went through. Lisa, well of course I'll send something, but what is sending a note going to do? What is that action? That's really odd. Okay, let me see what they're talking about. And then I observed the dialogue that happened on email with our board, and I said “okay, I've made the right decision because I'm amidst a group of people who are committed to justice, who don't see commercial viability and justice, equality, and equity as mutually exclusive.”

So I was immediately comforted because I said, well, I think I can be myself and my point of view won't be relegated to the back or marginalized, which often happens in these scenarios. You'll have a lone person, typically a person of color, who says we have to do A, B, or C. We have to change, and the structures are systemically damaging to such an idea. The concept of change means that everyone who has been relegated to the center has to now move to the margins and give space for those who have not been at the center to be in the center. So it's like ego gaming happened, and then there's the financial thing. So the social war that we were in made people actually start to look at how it would play out in business. It was the first time in my experience that social issues weren't just oh yeah, that was something terrible, now let's get back to work.

It was the first time where the lessons that people were learning in a social setting were actually applied or being considered. How do we disrupt this organization? Look at our membership, who's here, who's not here, why is that? Who feels that this space is theirs and when they walk in, they hold their shoulders back and walk really tall? Who's on the margins, and how do we disrupt that? And that plays out in our business structure, right? I mean, if you come to APAP, you go into that expo hall, there's a lot of power happening in that room. If you pay attention, the power dynamic is intense, and it also begs us to disrupt that. In our industry, who has the power? Is it a presenter? I thought it was the artist because I thought we were all working for the artist. 

So one of the things that became obvious to me and I wanted to share was the concept of an ecosystem. To be a healthy ecosystem, because we were laid bare, all our stuff, our dirty laundry was laid bare to show, we had to acknowledge what was wrong. If we're working in an ecosystem and we're really putting the artist at the center, it's not APAP at the center, it's not the presenter, it's not the agent, it's not the producer, it's not the audience. We're all spokes on the wheel. It's not the congressperson who sits on the advisory committee for transportation that somehow has to do with art because we don't have one for art exclusively, it's always tangential. 

But we're all spokes on the wheel working together to try to ensure that this art has space to be viable. That was revolutionary because I've been in the field long enough in different kinds of roles, and our viability is still a present question. When you use the word sustainability, people don't even know what that means because it's not creative, it's not innovative, it's not speaking to these things, but they don't have to be mutually exclusive. To be sustainable means that we're all working together in our own places, and you've got to be creative or you're going to get off this ecosystem because you're not going to be good enough to stay. You've got to still maintain all the unique properties that it means to be excellent in our work, but we have to work together.

For the first time, I was told because we were in a Zoom nation, right? We weren't on stage, we weren't coming through the doors, sitting like this. We had people at our Zoom doorstep, please fix it, tell us what to do, help us fix it. We had sessions with agents and managers just talking to each other. The dialogue, as opposed to well, they're over here and this is what their role is and their game is, and someone else is over here. People kept telling me that was really interesting. I got a chance to really talk to those presenters and find out what they're really looking for. You never have to do it, it seems so simple, why don't we do this in our industry? Pitting one another against each other as if one person has to go. Those were the things that were laid bare, and we had to undo that. So we developed programs to do that. It was revolutionary. It was very simple, just a Zoom meeting and inviting them home, giving this one a role and this one a role, but opening the door to that dialogue and that healthy network. 

Because the reality is that if we didn't find a way to plan for that, maybe it wasn't that year or even the next year, but maybe it's now. If we weren't getting in dialogue and not holding information or holding opportunity, we weren't coming back. So we had to get together and speak on it and be about it because as an industry, we wouldn't come back. 

We're still struggling, we could go into lots of dialogue on that. We're still struggling, it's a real uphill climb to get audiences back, to get all the things happening in order so that we can truly thrive. So we don't have time for small-mindedness, for people who are not going to come together. We have to make sure our structures are truly functional in that way and that they allow for that. We have to make sure that different voices like mine are actually not just welcomed in but allowed to stay. That hasn't always been the case. 

I just wrote a piece for International Arts Manager about that very topic. People welcomed a lot of black leaders in 2020, but by 2021 the funding dried up. The things that would have made your job a normal job suddenly became increasingly difficult. So it's easy to blame someone who you typically wouldn't have welcomed into leadership for your lack of success, maybe. But it's not that, there are these structures in place and it's very hard right now. It's just basic humanity. I always feel, I don't walk around with a race card in my hand and say hire me because I'm this or that. Please don't hire me for that. But I'm capable, and so many of us are. So many of us are, and we're truly serving our communities which are increasingly more diverse than ever. 

People are everywhere, it's a small world. People are moving everywhere. To be in Romania is not just to be of Romania. What's the new diversity here? To truly serve your community, you've got to be representative of it, you've got to be able to dialogue with them on all levels. So I think it was a welcome time, it's about time. My prayer is that it's not popular now to say diversity, equity. Nobody wants to hear it, funding dried up. People gave a lot of money to this kind of work and then suddenly it was a fad. Now you have to say accessibility, you can't say certain things, it's really politicized, at least in the United States. But my prayer is that we override that. This is a business, this is an industry, it's about people, it's about doing our best work, and it's about sustaining the future of our work. And that takes all of us, not just some of us, but all of us.

Kee Hong Low: It's interesting, right, that we talk about diversity, equity, and the needs of actually the global majority. You know, if you look at the population around the world, people of color make up the global majority. But we live in a structure in a world that completely turns us upside down. So I think the key question, Lisa, you laid it out very specifically and very clearly, the George Floyd incident was not the beginning of it all. It's always been there, but because of social media, because of how our world works, it became very visible. 

And every year a new crisis comes to the fore, and right now it's the Israel and Palestinian conflict. It's how the world machine works. But in the end, if you think about it, the key question I always ask myself is whose voices are still not in the room? Whose voices are still not at the table and why? So you said it right, there's a lot of privilege in this room, a lot of power in this room, but it's a misguided placement of power because we assume that we hold a lot of the financial structures and we're playing the game when the game is collapsing. 

We need new ways of understanding how the future looks. A lot of what we do at Factory International is about thinking about what these futures look like and inventing these futures together with the community, together with the voices who were never in the room, together with voices who were never invited to the table. 

Even better, let's draw the table and completely reinvent how we want to assemble, how we want to think about these new forms of being together, these new forms of working, new forms of thinking about where our world is right now, where do we want to go? Do we want to go towards a future that we all want to be part of, or do we continue to be part of the same structure that is becoming so irrelevant? So for me, like Lisa, there's an artificial division between the commercialization of our practice or the business side of our practice and thinking about diversity, accessibility, and more importantly, who are we doing what we're doing for? At the core of it, without them we don't exist, we don't need to exist. 

But I think also in the same aspect, we need to think about as institutions. My innate fear is that we become another institution, we become any other institution that we all know and struggle with. I've come from the world of the artists, I used to be an artist, now I'm a curator. So in that sense, it is a time of crisis or many crises that we're facing. It's important that us who are working in institutions that have access to resources, we have to think about what we do with this power? 

For a while, we were talking about sharing power, for a while we were talking about bringing people to the table, but that's still not quite right. I think now we should talk about how we give away power or step aside and let other people come in. Even if you give away power, you get to decide who you give it to. But more importantly, step aside. This is a radical proposition as someone who's fairly recently come into a role of leadership in the UK, historically this does not happen. So I also ask the same question, did you hire me because I look like this or because you hire me I can do what you know I can do? You're right, Lisa, there are many of us that can do a lot of things, but because the structures never gave us the opportunity. 

Now is a time of course, but more importantly, what does this time look like that we want to make together? So in some sense, I think just to quickly wrap up, it's important that we need to think quite radically. I'm less interested in trying to shift the same legal pieces around. I want to understand what are the new materials that we can find and lean into that perhaps inform how we think about the world. In the last five or six years, I've leaned very much to my indigenous communities and friends because it's a knowledge system that I've never grown up with, that I don't know much about. But very quickly you see that their relationship to sky and land, sea and earth, community, it's a completely different proposition to the structures we have now. So for me, this is one direction that I want to start to think about.

Cosmin Chivu: I think it's so interesting and we're learning so much from the passion and from hearing what is important to you because that translates to each and every one of us and reflects on what could be important to us and how we can contribute to what's important to you. It's always a two-way street because if we're not inspired, we cannot give back inspiration. I will continue with the same question for Harold because I think it's important to see that from a different perspective, especially in a country that had recent elections and we know that things didn't go as well as some thought.

Harold David: Definitely, my answers would probably have been different if you had invited me two months ago. Well, after the COVID crisis in 2020, in the Festival of Avignon, we had different challenges which were really connected to the special case of an open-access festival. In an open-access festival, the only law that works is the law of the market. It means that if you're an artist and you want to present your work, if you pay, you can do it in a good venue or a bad venue, but you can play. The diversity is made by the capacity of the producers and artists to pay for presenting their work. Because of that, we had a lot of diversity, but it was connected to the choices made by money. From an international point of view, if we look at the 200 shows which are coming from abroad, some continents are totally not present. Africa is not represented, South America is not represented. We have a lot of agents supported by their countries, coming from America, from all over Europe, of course, but money separates the capacity to be diverse.

When I became co-chairman, we decided to try to regulate this law of the market by defining the program in five axes. I won't detail all of them, but we knew that if we wanted to change the power of money, we had to work on the professionalization of all the participants in the festival, both French and international. We had to work on the ecological transition, which was a huge challenge for us because when you have 350,000 people together for three weeks, you have all the problems connected to the ecological impact. We had to reduce our carbon footprint and other ecological concerns. We also had to work on developing the possibility for intercultural dialogue to truly take its place in the festival. That's why we developed so many programs for the international aspect of the festival. We thought that with all these programs and developments, we would manage to change the rule, not only change it but regulate it somewhat, to what was previously decided only by the law of the market, which was really terrible for everybody.

Another challenge we had after the economic crisis was to ensure that the audience would come back. The artists were still eager to present their shows, having waited two years to do so. The good surprise was that last year we sold about 1.9 million tickets, so the audience was there, coming back, and the profession was there. We thought everything was going to go the right way, but now, as you said, after the European elections, we have a president who decided to dissolve the assembly. We are really at a historic turning point in French history. Next week, on the morning of July 8th, everything might change. The question will not be about innovative planning for a sustainable future, but about how culture will still exist in the country of lights. If the extreme right party comes to power, they are against diversity, against feminism, homophobic, against difference, racist. We will not be talking about a sustainable future but a future of resistance because that will be our future in France.

I don't know how it's working in other countries, but our cultural system is really based on a long history built after the Second World War, which makes the system dependent on state support. We know that the extreme right party has no program for culture, that they do not believe performing arts should exist, seeing them as a danger. So we know that our sustainable future will go through resistance and friction.

Cosmin Chivu: For Romania, accessibility and inclusivity have a different meaning. I will ask Mr. Chiriac to share with us what accessibility and inclusivity mean in our own country, Romania. Local accessibility could mean something different in terms of the reality compared to the United States or the UK, from the price of tickets to other aspects. What are the challenges we encounter when it comes to accessibility and inclusivity in Romania?

Constantin Chiriac: In 2020, when the catastrophe came upon us, the program of the festival was already done in March, and we were waiting to start promotion and the next steps. Then came the lockdown. In my opinion, the decision to close everything was the worst one. I never expected it to last more than a week, but it reached three weeks. I was prepared to do my best for the public and the actors, for the community that needed us. I decided that all the actors from the German theater and the Romanian theater would do a daily online program for the public. It was a crucial decision because in 2020, Sibiu was the only festival functioning because of the walk of fame that I built. I called everyone from Peter Brook to Peter Stein, Eugenio Barba, and many others. I asked them to give me very good shows with little money to do an online festival. Imagine, we are not America or the UK, with all the skills in our hands to do an online festival. But when there is passion and desire, and good connections, miracles happen. Luckily, we managed to have 10 days with around 200 different shows, reaching an audience of 89 million. It was unique in the world and received an unbelievable response from people everywhere. We did the cultural market, and it worked so well that we had big demands to do it again, but we need dialogue. So in 2020, I decided to do another cultural market in September.

Being the director of the national theater, with 130 shows in the repertory, I wondered what to do for the public. With the same money, we built a digital stage, and all the shows we produced were also online, like Netflix, with translations. It was one of the most important moves we made.

If you look at what we have been doing in the festival for many years, we have been playing in all the outdoor spaces for our public, who come from all over the world. The community is proud that we do this primarily for them, with good quality and diversity. We work with people from Europe, America, and all over the world. In the audience, we have people from Europe, Arab countries, Israel, Africa, Asia, and South America. It is important to have good artists and dialogue. For example, we had a world premiere with Pippo Delbono and Tim Robbins. We did a concert with them and a Romanian choir in the name of friendship. It was an amazing opening, prepared in one week with dialogue and attention to the community and the world.

We developed industrial spaces for shows because our people need contact with the miracle happening worldwide. We have a long-standing show called Faust, which is always sold out. We developed these spaces because our public needs contact with the world. We also work with NATO soldiers on our territory, giving them 3,000 links for free to watch our shows. It is about thinking and being attentive to the community and the world.

We have volunteers from all over the world, selected to help with the festival. This gives them an idea of friendship and learning without imposing. We also have the festival of universities within the festival, allowing students to meet and dialogue with each other and with big choreographers and artists. This links everything in a creative way, not for my glory, but for the community and the festival's mission.

When I started this festival, I dreamed of understanding the vision of the Avignon festival, a popular festival with good quality, open for everyone. We think about what we can offer, not just ask. We have a digital platform like Netflix with 70 different shows. It is about thinking and being attentive to the community and the world.

Constantin Chivu: Thank you, Mr. Chiriac, for this comprehensive answer. My next question is for Vicențiu. How do you involve the community, and how do you plan on involving the community even further?

Vicențiu Rahău: I was thinking about what Harold said about France and I remembered in 2014, Olivier Py managed to move the Avignon festival to another city if the extreme right won. With Harold and Shona from Edinburgh, we were talking about access to culture because in Avignon, a lot of people rent their houses during the festival and leave. One of the reasons the extreme right was not accessing culture. Every year we have something new coming at us. Kee was saying something is always coming and bombing us. During the pandemic, we didn't lose contact with the audience. We went online. It's important to meet new people and create dialogue. The only future is through culture with the other. There is so much hate today. Let's hope for good results in June 13 in France. We need dialogue and meeting each other as much as possible, giving high quality and being ourselves.

Kee Hong Low: In terms of community engagement, it's quite at the core of what we do. About five years ago, we created two forums: the People's Forum and the Young People's Forum. They critique everything we do, from programming to ticket prices, and have representatives on our board. They wanted to be more involved in programming, so we created the Factory Academy. Last November, they curated everything for nine days. We have neighborhood organizers living and working in different boroughs of Greater Manchester, informing us about their community's needs. Community engagement is less something on the side; it's part of our ethos. We have a structure that involves community folks in many aspects of our organization. We also have a young curators' school starting soon.

Harold David: In the Avignon Festival, engagement is not really existing in the sense of being an engagement. The festival is connected to the community economically, producing 50 million euros every year. But we don't really have any financial support, just help in terms of places to organize things. The community doesn't feel involved in the festival's global policy for development. It has always worked by itself, and there is no real engagement from the community.

Lisa Richards Toney: I used to be the Director of Education in my past career, and community engagement was always seen as a secondary role. But now it's at the center. At APAP, we make space for others, bringing people together. Many festivals started under APAP because people wanted to gather with their colleagues. We have affinity groups, allowing people to find their community within a larger community. During the pandemic, we opened our Zoom rooms for broader conversations, developing monthly forums called Real Talk in Real Time. These fostered transparency and engagement. Our work is going in the direction of community engagement, and it will serve us well in the future.