Market power: rules, capital, and gatekeeping in the global performing arts

At SIPAM’s second panel of its thirtieth edition, arts leaders from Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States examined a market that calls itself international while distributing access unevenly. Their debate moved past the image of a single gatekeeper and toward a harder conclusion: power is built into relationships, resources, language, mobility and the everyday act of choosing what gets seen.

The panel featured Abou Kamaté, General Director of MASA in Côte d’Ivoire; David Baile, CEO of ISPA; Lisa Richards Toney, President and CEO of APAP; So Kwok-Wan, Associate Programme Director of the Hong Kong Arts Festival; and Cosmin Chivu, SIPAM’s Director of Industry Programme, while the discussion was moderated by Romanian dramaturg and journalist Ionuț Sociu.

Together, they examined the structures shaping the international circulation of the performing arts: who gains access, who can afford to remain visible, whose language carries authority, and which works are considered sufficiently tour-ready, fundable or familiar to enter global circuits. Moving beyond questions of curatorial taste, the conversation explored how power is distributed among festivals, markets, networks, funders and artists. As Sociu asked at the outset, “Are we talking about a neutral space of exchange or a system shaped by power and exclusion?” The question framed a wider debate about whether gatekeeping has disappeared or simply shifted into less visible systems built around applications, fees, language and professional relationships.

David Baile, CEO of the International Society for the Performing Arts (ISPA), resisted beginning entirely from a negative premise. Markets and festivals can create opportunity, he argued, and the arts still carry a role in cultural diplomacy. But that potential exists inside political conditions that institutions cannot wish away. “The global geopolitical situation is having a huge impact on artists and producers and their ability to tour,” he said. “Government policy is shaping that a lot.” For Baile, festivals can counter some of that force by bringing “often underrepresented or non-represented voices into the dialogue.” The tension between those two realities, political restriction and cultural invitation, ran through the conversation.

Lisa Richards Toney, president and CEO of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP), located gatekeeping in a more intimate place: the moment when a newcomer walks into a vast marketplace and discovers that everyone else appears already connected. She recalled attending APAP in her early twenties as a Kennedy Center fellow and entering an expo hall of roughly 300 booths. Her assignment was simple: walk through, meet people and make a short pitch, but the room made her feel invisible. Eye contact seemed to pass through her toward someone already known.

Years later, as the organisation’s leader, Toney deliberately works to reverse that experience. She now makes “a point to find the eyes of people who are looking for someone to connect with” and to approach the booths that others pass by. The gesture may appear small, but it reveals how a marketplace can communicate belonging long before a contract is discussed.

Toney recalled being told that “it takes about five years of coming to APAP before you really get the benefits of APAP,” an assessment she immediately challenged: “Five years? That’s just too long.” Yet she did not dismiss the relationships accumulated during that time, describing them as both the system’s strength and one of its principal barriers.

Long-standing booth numbers become familiar addresses, trust develops into commercial memory, and repeated attendance becomes evidence of professional seriousness. “You can call that gatekeeping,” Toney acknowledged, or “a system that is not as accessible to newcomers.” At the same time, she stressed that the performing arts market is fundamentally relational: “It is all relationship-based.” During the pandemic, these connections became a survival network for artists, agents and presenters. The problem, therefore, was not the existence of relationships, but the expectation that newcomers should absorb years of expense and uncertainty before being able to build them.

For So Kwok-Wan, Associate Programme Director of the Hong Kong Arts Festival, power resides in the act of selection itself. Although the Festival was established in 1973 with an international mission, every programme requires choices between regions, genres, production scales, audience expectations and financial risk. As So put it, “The reality is always that there is a choice.” The more difficult question is what programmers do with those choices and “how we exercise our power in this selection.”

Looking back on three decades of programming, So acknowledged that his own selections remained predominantly European and North American. This pattern, he explained, was not simply a matter of personal preference, but was shaped by Hong Kong’s colonial and tourism history, audience familiarity and the commercial pressure to sell tickets. The Festival’s funding structure intensifies that pressure: direct government support has declined from approximately 40 per cent when it began to around 12 to 15 per cent, leaving a greater share of its revenue dependent on ticket sales, sponsorship, donations and matching funds. The Festival’s published figures for 2025/26 place baseline government funding at around 12 per cent, confirming the scale of this shift.

Yet So rejected the assumption that sponsorship inevitably produces conservative programming. Sponsors may prefer recognisable forms such as ballet, opera and classical works, but programmers can respond to those expectations while taking risks elsewhere. They can also persuade sponsors to support new work through stronger storytelling. His observation that he had been “exercising self-censorship for 30 years, because selection is the censorship” shifted the discussion beyond explicitly prohibited subjects. Every programme excludes more than it includes; the ethical question is therefore not whether curators exercise power, but whether they acknowledge it and use it to expand the field rather than reproduce familiar routes. As So noted, “Sponsors want something very safe,” but the essential question remains: “What are the risks that we are taking outside of the sponsorship sphere?”

When Sociu asked whether markets serve artists or artists serve markets, Toney answered that markets “absolutely do serve the artists.” The booking ecosystem links presenters and venues with artists, managers and agents; showcases give work a platform; pitch sessions make an artistic proposition visible. At APAP, she said, a strong year can bring around 1,000 showcases across the conference hotel and New York City. Yet the same system distributes opportunity according to organisational capacity.

A large agency can send a team into the market and follow up every lead. A two-person agency may meet twenty presenters and have time to pursue only half of them before seasons are announced. The disparity looks like administration, but its consequence is artistic circulation. “The reality is, yes, the more resources you have, the more opportunities you have,” Toney said. “But I think, as those of us who sit in the seat like I do, we have a responsibility to think of these alternate ways so that people can gain more access.”

Her alternatives included lower artist rates, virtual participation, digital advice, accessible leadership and reciprocal mentorship. The last point challenged the familiar hierarchy between established professionals and new entrants: “You need mentoring by someone who’s 20, because you don’t really know how to work AI.” Access, in this account, is not charity offered by the experienced to the inexperienced. It is an exchange of knowledge that institutions need if they are to remain useful.

David Baile agreed that performing arts markets ultimately exist to serve artists, but immediately complicated that principle: “When we’re talking about serving the artist, we serve the artist, yes. But it really very much comes down to which artist.” His response exposed the limits of institutional reach, particularly when access depends on language, financial resources and the ability to leave one’s work and community in order to attend an international gathering.

English fluency, Baile noted, strongly influences who can establish relationships and conduct business. Financial barriers remain even when fellowships cover major costs, because participation also involves time away from work and additional expenses. He offered a revealing ratio: ISPA had twenty fellowship places for 290 applicants. Beyond that visible demand, he asked how many thousands of artists and producers remained unaware of the opportunity or were unable to operate professionally in English.

Although ISPA’s network extends across approximately fifty countries, Baile stressed that representation within each country remains narrow. “We’re just scratching the surface of what we could be doing,” he acknowledged, leaving institutions with two urgent questions: “How do we open that door? How do we make it truly accessible?”

Abou Kamaté, general director of the Marché des Arts du Spectacle Africain d’Abidjan (MASA), joined remotely from Côte d’Ivoire and gave the panel’s clearest account of how exclusion becomes material. MASA was first held in Abidjan in 1993 and was created to strengthen African performing arts, develop professional capacity and facilitate the movement of artists and their work within Africa and internationally. Kamaté said the event is about 90 per cent state-funded and covers the travel, visas, accommodation and meals of participating artists, while keeping performances free to the public. “Today, I consider the market, as it currently functions, to be more of an obstacle for African creators”, added Abou Kamaté.

Kamaté’s central example was the visa. An artist can hold an invitation from a major festival and have flights paid for, yet still be unable to travel. “From the moment you cannot move, you cannot go and sell your work, and the notion of the market becomes problematic,” he said. A market may formally welcome everyone while border systems decide who can appear in person. In that sense, mobility policy is cultural policy, and visa access is part of curatorial power even when no curator controls it.

His response was not to wait for the Global North to open its doors. Kamaté argued for a stronger continental and local market within Africa as leverage. “If we manage to strengthen our internal performing arts market, we will be much stronger, and perhaps other markets will become interested in us,” he said. MASA’s mobility support for African programmers, festivals and theatres is one attempt to build that infrastructure. It also contests the assumption that international success begins only after a work travels north.

Kamaté also challenged the belief that African work costs more than it returns. Without curiosity, he warned, programming becomes monotonous: the same artists and the same shows move through the same circuits, while emerging talent remains unseen. His appeal to decision-makers was to develop a greater curiosity about African creation, visit, watch and build the knowledge needed to present it to audiences.

Cosmin Chivu, SIPAM’s director of industry programming, approached the question through his experience as a Romanian immigrant in the United States. After completing his directing degree in 2003, teachers urged him to attend APAP and ISPA. He entered those spaces and felt that there was no room for him. Registration costing more than $1,000 was, at the time, “a number that I could not even conceive.” The price was only one signal; reputation, institutional affiliation and cultural familiarity carried their own weight. “No matter where you go, no matter where you move, no matter how much access you have that other people don’t, you still have to prove yourself twice before anyone will trust you as an immigrant,” added Cosmin.

Chivu also described change as fellowship and volunteer programmes created new routes into institutions that once seemed sealed; leaders made themselves more available; young producers gained direct contact with decision-makers. SIPAM’s own model, embedded within the Sibiu International Theatre Festival and free to attend, was presented as another design choice. Its continuing reliance on sponsors means that free access is not guaranteed forever, but Chivu framed it as an aspiration worth defending.

By the end of the discussion, no participant had located market power in a single institution. Festivals choose; funders set conditions; sponsors shape risk; agencies convert relationships into bookings; governments control mobility; dominant languages determine who can negotiate; and artists and small organisations carry costs that larger structures can absorb. The market is therefore neither neutral nor controlled by one gatekeeper. It is a chain of decisions whose effects accumulate.

So returned to the meaning of the word international. “We always say that we are international. Actually, it is just a few countries,” he said. The correction was less semantic than structural. A programme can be geographically diverse on paper and still rely on a narrow circuit of trusted institutions, familiar aesthetics and export-ready formats. For So, the live encounter remained the beginning of a different model: “Sharing a space with artists from everywhere in the world is the starting point of a real exchange.”

Kamaté closed his intervention with a practical invitation rather than an abstract demand. “Appetite comes with eating,” he said. “The more you discover African creativity, the more arguments you will have for proposing it to your audiences.” 

A more equitable performing arts market would therefore require more than a diverse showcase list. It would need lower financial thresholds, language access, mobility support, transparent routes into networks, reciprocal knowledge between generations, and institutions willing to carry more of the risk now placed on artists. It would also require markets to measure success not only by deals made, but by who gained the capacity to return. The panel’s answer to Sociu’s opening question was implicit but firm: exchange becomes real only when the conditions of exchange are shared.