Thirty Years of Keeping the Doors Open: SIPAM Reconsiders International Exchange

At the opening of its 30th edition, the Sibiu International Performing Arts Market brought together cultural leaders all over the world to ask what international exchange can still mean in a world of tighter borders, rising costs and political instability. Their answer was a renewed argument for mobility, public investment and the performing arts as essential civic infrastructure.

The 30th edition of the Sibiu International Performing Arts Market opened on Monday morning with an anniversary large enough to invite celebration, but also serious enough to resist it. Taking place from 22 to 25 June as part of the 33rd Sibiu International Theatre Festival, SIPAM reached its milestone at a moment when the very conditions that allow international cultural exchange are becoming harder to sustain. Artist mobility is being restricted by visa regimes and administrative barriers, touring costs are rising, war and geopolitical instability are reshaping routes and relationships. Public funding systems are moving more slowly than the sector they are meant to support.

The opening conference, titled Three Decades of International Exchange, brought those pressures into the same room as the people responsible for some of the performing arts' most influential networks, festivals and public support mechanisms. Speakers from the Edinburgh International Festival, the International Society for the Performing Arts, the Association of Performing Arts Professionals, Performing Arts Hub Norway, Circostrada and Romania's Ministry of Culture joined SIPAM's leadership to consider how the field has changed and what kind of infrastructure it now needs.

The discussion began with a question from moderator Cosmin Chivu, SIPAM's Director of Industry Programme: what did the world look like 30 years ago? His brief return to the late 1990s, when Romania was still seeking NATO membership and digital communication had barely entered cultural organisations, placed SIPAM's history inside a much larger political and technological transformation. Yet Chivu identified a continuity more important than the surrounding changes: "We are here because we share a common passion for telling stories."

SIPAM first took place in 1997 and unlike many professional markets developed as independent industry events, it was conceived as part of FITS, allowing delegates to encounter projects and partners while also experiencing the city, its audiences and a live festival programme. That structure remains central to SIPAM's identity. It gives the Market a professional function, but it also makes every conversation accountable to the art taking place beyond the conference room.

For Constantin Chiriac, President of SIPAM and FITS, that model grew out of what he had learned from Edinburgh and Avignon, but also from what he believed their structures did not yet provide. "The reason I founded SIPAM 30 years ago is that, as I was explaining to Roy, I had learned a great deal from the world's largest festivals, Edinburgh and Avignon," he told delegates. "So I decided to create a cultural market in the middle of the festival."

Chiriac recalled a first FITS edition with three countries and eight shows. Thirty-three years later, he said, the festival programme brings artists from 83 countries to Sibiu for hundreds of events across ten days. Its scale is particularly striking in relation to a city of just over 140,000 inhabitants, but his account of the festival's development was less about expansion than about the ecosystem built around it.

"Everything we have done has been achieved with the people around me and with a sense of belonging, which is what community means," Chiriac said. "We understood that the great performances we bring must be surrounded by the younger generation."

That principle produced a network of connected structures: a major volunteering programme, partnerships with theatre schools, an international university festival, a doctoral platform now involving 69 universities, and Fabrica de Cultura, the former industrial site that has become one of FITS's defining cultural spaces. It also shaped the festival's relationship with its public. Chiriac said that more than half of the programme is free and takes place outdoors, while a public consultation is organised around each new edition. For him, spectators are part of the institution's ongoing construction.

The opening also made space for the personal histories carried by that community. SIPAM Coordinator Arina Bartha dedicated the anniversary edition to George Banu, the Romanian-born theatre critic and scholar whose work connected Romanian and international theatre cultures for decades. "He was, and remains, a special part of our community," she said. The dedication placed remembrance alongside institutional continuity: markets are sustained not only by formal partnerships, but by friendships, mentorships and intellectual exchanges that survive the people who began them.

If SIPAM's first three decades coincided with the transformation of communication from landlines and shared email addresses to digital platforms and artificial intelligence, David Baile, CEO of the International Society for the Performing Arts, argued that technology is not the sector's most consequential change.

Thirty years ago, Baile was running a new-play development theatre in Toronto. The company had one email address and a one-page website. Today, digital systems influence creation, communication and distribution, while the economic logic of entire fields has been reversed. Musicians, he observed, once toured to promote albums; now albums are often produced to promote tours. Yet the performing arts have repeatedly adapted to technological disruption. The more urgent problem, he said, is whether artists can travel at all.

His argument shifted the discussion away from mobility as a logistical concern and towards mobility as a question of representation. When visas, fees and political conditions determine who can cross a border, they also determine which aesthetics, experiences and political perspectives reach international audiences. In this context, festivals are not neutral platforms, they become mechanisms for keeping channels open.

"Festivals such as FITS and the Edinburgh International Festival play a critical role in ensuring that we continue to hear voices from around the world," Baile added. "As a community, we must continue to ensure and facilitate the presence of voices that are not often represented."

Hege Knarvik Sande, CEO of Performing Arts Hub Norway, approached the same question from a country whose relatively small domestic field makes international exchange essential to artistic development. Her organisation supports mobility and connections for performing artists in Norway and abroad, but that work now requires responses to climate pressures, war, geopolitical instability and rising costs.

"We need more sustainable touring models, stronger support systems and continued investment in international partnerships that can last over time," Sande said. "From a Nordic perspective, public support remains essential. International exchange does not happen by itself. It requires investment, commitment and organisations that help artists build networks and create opportunities beyond their own countries."

Her intervention challenged the idea that international circulation emerges naturally from artistic quality or professional ambition. Exchange has to be financed, administered and maintained. At a time of political fragmentation, it also serves a wider purpose. "When the world feels more divided, the need for dialogue, cultural exchange and international collaboration becomes even greater," she said. "In today's world, I believe that more international collaboration, not less, is the answer."

Roy Luxford, Creative Director of the Edinburgh International Festival, returned to the historical conditions that made festival cities possible. Edinburgh's International Festival began in 1947, and artists who were not invited created their own event in parallel, laying the foundations for the Fringe. In that first post-war year, residents opened spare bedrooms to visiting artists, donated ration-book coupons to feed them and contributed coal so that the castle could be illuminated. The story is familiar within Edinburgh's festival history, but in Sibiu it acquired renewed relevance: cultural scale began with local acts of participation.

Luxford noted that the International Festival does not operate an arts market of its own and that most of its audience is domestic, with around half rooted in Edinburgh itself. What connects Edinburgh and Sibiu is therefore not an identical institutional model, but an understanding of the festival as an encounter between visiting artists and a city prepared to receive them.

His most pointed response came after Chiriac spoke about Romania's proximity to the war in Ukraine and the pressure on NATO countries to increase defence spending. "And what if, Constantin, everybody spent five per cent of their budget on culture?" Luxford asked. "What kind of world would that be to live in? What kind of world would that create for our artists?"

The question resonated with FITS 2026's theme, Soul, and with Chiriac's insistence that security cannot be understood only through military capacity. The festival is offering thousands of digital access links to military students and personnel across Romania. "Each of them has a body and a mind, but first of all a soul," Chiriac said. "It is important to send this message, because we need to show strength through performances that bring beauty and emotion, not through killing and destruction."

Lisa Richards Toney, President and CEO of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals, extended that argument from the individual soul to the civic body. Reflecting on a difficult period for the arts in the United States, she acknowledged touring barriers, xenophobia and shrinking resources, but described the current moment as a "return home": an opportunity for artists and organisations to reconsider who they are, whom they serve and why their work matters.

Her distinction between culture as something "fancy" and culture as something essential became one of the conference's clearest statements of value. "What we ignite is the soul of people," Richards Toney said. "It is not fancy; it is essential. Those are two different things. Fancy is something you can choose to do or be. Essential is something you have to do, something you have to be."

That essential function, she argued, becomes visible in the flow of people through theatres and presenting houses. Arts venues are often among the busiest buildings in their communities, yet they are rarely described in the same terms as transport, public utilities or other systems that organise urban life. "People are the infrastructure," she said. "The arts are the infrastructure, and that is the reclaiming of value we must undertake."

For Richards Toney, international relationships must remain active even when formal mobility is constrained. Trust cannot be rebuilt instantly when political conditions improve; it must be preserved through conferences, delegations and continued contact. "We must keep our relationships warm and ready, like family, so that when the pendulum shifts back, we are prepared," she said.

The discussion moved from advocacy to the mechanisms that could make those ambitions possible when Bogdan Trîmbaciu, Director of the Project Management Unit within Romania's Ministry of Culture, addressed the gap between the performing arts and public financing.

He announced that the unit is drafting the next cultural programme under the EEA and Norway Grants, with future calls expected to include cultural entrepreneurship, theatre, festivals and artist mobility. Norwegian partners were also invited to SIPAM to discuss the priorities that could shape financing over the next several years. The exchange demonstrated one of the Market's less visible functions: it places artists, intermediaries and public authorities in a setting where funding policy can be confronted with the practical conditions of cultural work.

Trîmbaciu also linked future investment to infrastructure, including plans under discussion for the continued development of Fabrica de Cultura. It was a concrete answer to the broader claims made throughout the morning. If the arts are infrastructure, the phrase must eventually become budgets, buildings, programmes and accessible routes for artists.

A shared place for fragile sectors

The anniversary edition expands SIPAM's international echo by hosting Circostrada's Annual General Meeting in Sibiu from 24 to 26 June. The network brings together more than 180 professionals in contemporary circus and outdoor arts, fields whose mobility has historically been intrinsic to training, production and touring, even as their institutional recognition remains uneven.

Circostrada Coordinator Alice Brunot described these sectors as international long before internationalisation became a cultural policy objective. Artists travelled because training infrastructure was limited, because shows were built collectively and because careers depended on movement. Today, however, administrative restrictions and pressure on artistic freedom are producing not only blocked mobility, but in some contexts forced mobility.

Her presence also underlined the relationship between FITS's outdoor programme and the professional debates taking place inside SIPAM. After seeing thousands of spectators gather in Sibiu's streets and squares, Brunot connected public-space performance to the conference's concern with community and emotion. The first joint SIPAM and Circostrada plenary will examine how outdoor arts and contemporary circus shape cultural legacy, civic identity and public space, while bringing practitioners into dialogue with policymakers.

That may be the clearest measure of SIPAM after 30 editions. Its value cannot be reduced to the number of delegates, pitches or agreements completed during four days in June. It lies in its capacity to place different parts of the performing arts system in contact: artists and funders, festivals and networks, ministries and independent professionals, international guests and local audiences. Because it remains embedded in FITS, the Market is continually brought back to the reason those systems exist: the work on stage, in factories, churches, theatres, streets and public squares, and the people gathered to experience it.

Invited back to the stage for the closing words, Chiriac chose possibility over ceremony. "Thank you for all the ideas and for the emotion you brought to this opening," he said. "I am sure that many of your ideas and thoughts will become reality."

This edition of SIPAM brings together more than 250 participants from over 45 countries, with the full programme and further details available at sibiuartsmarket.ro.