Equitable Touring: Performance, Technology, and Sustainable Futures

What are we going to do about touring?

It's a question the sector has been circling for years, but right now it demands an answer.

Touring performance is at a crossroads. The infrastructure that once moved work across the UK and Europe is under extraordinary pressure: rising costs, funding austerity, shrinking venue networks, and a widening gap between what is commercially viable and what is artistically and socially necessary. The problems are well-known. This conference is about what comes next.

Hosted by the Centre for Performance, Technology, and Equity (PTEQ) at Royal Central, this two-day event will explore what a reimagined future for touring might look like, and how we might start building it together.

Day One features a programme of panels, roundtables, research presentations, and practice sharings, structured around three interconnected questions: How do we make touring financially and ecologically sustainable? How do we sustain transnational exchange whilst developing appproaches on a local level? And what does responsible, equitable touring look like in practice?

Highlights include a presentation by Arts Council England sharing insights from their major new research on the State of Touring Across the Performing Arts Ecology, alongside contributions from Independent Theatre Council, Local Theatre Touring Alliance, Fevered Sleep, Variable Matter, Theatre Green Book, Battersea Arts Centre, LIFT, Project 1961, and the Association of British Theatre Technicians, among others.

Day Two takes a different form. Opening with the question "what are we going to do about touring?", we will gather for a day of non-hierarchical, participant-led conversations inspired by day before. The conversations will be facilitated by Improbable, a theatre company who specialise in using a process called Open Space Technology (OST). OST is a simple way for groups of people to think, work and take action together around a shared concern. There is no set agenda and you decide what to discuss. You are free to move between conversations in a single session depending on what interests you. You can read more about Improbable and Open Space here.

Together, the two days are designed to generate new ideas, connections, and momentum for the future of touring in the UK and beyond.

Info: Arts Council England presents new research on the current state of touring across the performing arts, offering findings from their major 2025/26 research project into outdoor, rural, community, and small-scale touring. What does the data tell us, and what does it mean for how we think about the future?

Info: A short break before the programme splits into parallel tracks.

Info: What happens when we shift the focus of touring from the show to the way it's made and shared? This roundtable brings together artists whose practice centres relational, process-led, and participatory approaches to explore what a process-oriented model of touring might offer, and what it demands.

Info: Drawing on historical and archival perspectives, this panel examines what earlier models of touring can teach us about how to build something better today.

Info: As market logic tightens its grip on what gets toured and where, this panel asks what alternative economic and ethical frameworks might look like. What does touring look like when it's organised around need, community, and artistic risk rather than commercial viability?

Info: A new hybrid performance work that unfolds simultaneously across live theatre and online first-person-shooter video games, by the team behind the acclaimed Grand Theft Hamlet.

Info: A practical, sector-facing roundtable examining the technical and production challenges of contemporary touring.

Info: Chaired by Theatre Green Book, this panel develops a single urgent proposition: that the future of touring will not be found by doing the same thing more efficiently, but by building new kinds of infrastructure that place equity and ecology at the centre, not the margin.

Info: A cross-artform conversation exploring how companies and venues are finding new ways to tour, programme, and present work in a constrained landscape. Chaired by Charlotte Jones (Independent Theatre Council).

Info: An account of the development, piloting, and reception of the Anti-Racism Touring Rider, a practical tool designed to embed anti-racist commitments into touring contracts and relationships. What has it achieved, where has it met resistance, and where does it go next?

Info: As international touring becomes more complex, this session focuses on the politics of ‘hosting’ artists from different cultural contexts, the implications of Brexit, and emerging approaches beyond concept touring

Info: Writer and dramaturg Maddy Costa reflects on the day's conversations, drawing out recurring threads and open questions to carry into Day Two.

Info: Starting with the question "what are we going to do about touring?", we will gather for a day of non-hierarchical, participant-led conversations inspired by day before. The conversations will be facilitated by Improbable, a theatre company who specialise in using a process called Open Space Technology (OST). OST is a simple way for groups of people to think, work and take action together around a shared concern. There is no set agenda and you decide what to discuss. You are free to move between conversations in a single session depending on what interests you.

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Host or Publisher RCSSD Research Office