Risk and Relevance: Reimagining the Big Festival Model

At SIPAM 2026, festival leaders from Edinburgh, Istanbul, Hong Kong and Sibiu confronted a model caught between artistic risk, political scrutiny and an expanding list of civic obligations. The contemporary international festival is expected to perform an increasingly impossible balancing act. It must attract audiences, generate tourism, satisfy sponsors, support artists, educate young people, respond to political crises, reduce its environmental footprint and demonstrate measurable social impact. At the same time, it is still expected to take the artistic risks that justify its existence.

During the panel Reimagining the Big Festival Model, held as part of the Sibiu International Performing Arts Market, moderator Alicia Adams, founder of URUCUM Global Arts, invited four festival leaders to examine what is genuinely at risk: finances, artistic freedom, political legitimacy or the connection with local audiences. The conversation brought together Roy Luxford, Creative Director of the Edinburgh International Festival; Handan Uzal Dündar, Programming and Operations Manager of the Istanbul Theatre Festival; Tisa Ho, former Executive Director of the Hong Kong Arts Festival; and Vicențiu Rahău, Creative Director of the Sibiu International Theatre Festival.

What emerged was a portrait of the international festival as a complex and increasingly fragile ecosystem.

When success limits artistic risk

Edinburgh offers perhaps the clearest expression of the big festival model. Its August festivals collectively issue more than three million tickets in some years, transforming a relatively small city into one of the world’s densest cultural destinations.

Yet visibility and longevity can create a misleading impression of permanence. The Edinburgh International Festival will celebrate its 80th anniversary in 2027, but Luxford warned that institutions which have existed for generations are often assumed to be self-sustaining.

“Everything needs nurturing to sustain it,” he said. “There’s never a perception of how fragile the model is.”

As public subsidy fails to keep pace with inflation, ticket revenue inevitably gains greater influence over programming decisions. Luxford explained that the festival has become more precise in engineering longer runs, broader audiences and stronger box-office returns. Its most recent edition reached approximately 84 percent capacity, compared with figures closer to 50 or 60 percent more than a decade ago.

Fuller venues may appear to be an unequivocal success, but the numbers also reveal how the programme itself has changed. “The ability to programme work which we know will only play to a small audience, but probably needs a larger house, is diminishing,” Luxford said. “Not everything needs to be about scale.”

The danger is not necessarily the disappearance of experimental work, but the gradual erosion of space for extraordinary productions that will never attract mass audiences. Artistic risk is rarely eliminated through a single decision. More often, it is reduced quietly, through calculations about venue size, performance runs, ticket prices and projected capacity.

Tisa Ho described a similar balancing act in Hong Kong, where adventurous productions with limited audiences have traditionally been supported by commercially successful “blockbuster” performances.

That balance becomes harder to maintain when private support is involved. “Sponsors are the most risk-averse people,” she said, noting that corporations facing economic uncertainty or announcing job losses may be unwilling to associate themselves with challenging artistic work.

Foundations, too, increasingly arrive with their own priorities. “Rather than saying, ‘It looks like you’re doing a good job, let’s help you do what you’re doing,’ many foundations now have their own mission statements,” Ho explained. “Sometimes, it almost feels like they’re outsourcing their work to us.”

Programming with other people’s eyes

For the Istanbul Theatre Festival, the question of sustainability begins afresh every year. The festival receives no governmental funding and must rebuild its budget through private sponsorship.

“Every year, you have the biggest question: can we organise our festival next year or not?” Handan Uzal Dündar said. “Every year, we start from scratch to raise the total budget.”

That uncertainty makes long-term artistic planning difficult and introduces the priorities of sponsors into the curatorial process, even before any explicit request is made. “You start to think on behalf of them sometimes,” Dündar admitted. “You are seeing things with someone else’s eyes.”

The Istanbul Theatre Festival nevertheless continues to include forms that may be harder to sell, particularly contemporary dance. Dündar argued that withdrawing these productions because of weak ticket projections would prevent audiences from ever developing a relationship with them. “You cannot love anything that you don’t know about,” she said. “It is important to create these encounters first and to repeat them.”

Her observation went to the heart of the festival’s cultural function. A festival cannot simply reflect existing demand, it must also create the conditions in which new curiosity, knowledge and audiences can emerge.

Political stages

The pressure on festivals is not exclusively economic. They are increasingly expected to take public positions on wars, boycotts, national identity and the political affiliations of artists.

Luxford argued that the Edinburgh International Festival should remain primarily “a space for artists and excellence,” rather than issuing an institutional response to every political subject. Artists, he suggested, are often better equipped to explore complex realities than organisations attempting to align their programmes with the issue of the day.

“There’s a curated festival, and then there’s something that is not curated. That’s papier-mâché: pick your issue of the day,” he said.

Nationality should not automatically become a curatorial category either. “Artists are there for their artistic intent and expression, not because of where they come from,” Luxford added.

Yet even a commitment to artistic freedom does not remove political pressure. He recalled presenting a politically charged production about censorship, only to find the festival itself criticised and, in effect, censored for programming it. “It was a risk worth taking. It was a calculated risk,” he said. “But it might just make you think about the next choice.”

In Istanbul, attending a performance can itself become a form of political expression. “Buying a ticket is not only about seeing the show. It is also a political choice,” Dündar said. A theatre can offer audiences a rare space in which they find themselves surrounded by people who share their concerns, particularly when those positions cannot be expressed comfortably elsewhere.

Tisa Ho described Hong Kong as a place that continues to live “between shifting geopolitical plates.” While she did not experience censorship as an everyday presence, she acknowledged a change in public behaviour. “We are more careful, to be perfectly honest,” she said. “The risk is in the perception that people may think this is not the place they want to go.”

For Ho, however, Hong Kong’s uncertainty is also part of its energy. The city’s need to maintain international engagement creates opportunities for artistic exchange, collaboration and the development of initiatives such as the Hong Kong Performing Arts Expo.

A festival for the city

For Vicențiu Rahău, the greatest risk facing FITS is the possible loss of its educational mission and its relationship with Sibiu’s younger generations. The festival was founded 33 years ago as a student initiative, and education remains embedded throughout its structure, from workshops and conferences to its extensive volunteer programme.

“The biggest risk is to lose the educational side, to lose the young generation, the teenagers and all these stages of the educational path,” Rahău said. “It is the threat and, at the same time, our biggest value.”

FITS programmes well in advance, with much of the following edition already planned before the current festival begins. But Romania’s lack of multiannual public funding means that organisers often make artistic commitments without knowing what resources will eventually be available.

“We have to be friends and trusted partners for the future,” Rahău said. Without that trust, festivals in the region would struggle to secure major international companies several years ahead.

Sibiu also demonstrates how a festival can reshape the material life of a city. Rahău recalled that, when FITS began, Sibiu had only one three-star hotel. The festival’s development accompanied the expansion of accommodation, transport and cultural infrastructure, as well as the city’s designation as European Capital of Culture in 2007. 

Starting again

The most radical moment of the discussion came when the panel considered whether the festival model itself should be dismantled and rebuilt.

What if Edinburgh’s International Festival no longer took place in August? What if it became a season rather than an intense annual concentration of performances? What if major commercial productions were separated from smaller artistic projects? What if a festival became deliberately smaller?

Edinburgh’s success has also made the city increasingly expensive and difficult to navigate. “We are too big,” Luxford acknowledged, while discussing accommodation prices, overcrowding and the limits of the city’s infrastructure. Degrowth, in this context, would not necessarily represent retreat. A smaller festival might create more space for artistic risk, improve working conditions, reduce pressure on its host city and allow audiences to experience work with greater attention.

What would remain is the quality that cannot be translated into KPIs: the moment when a room full of strangers becomes a temporary community.

“When you’re in the house and everybody is holding their breath, especially before the applause starts, that’s the best moment,” Ho said.

Dündar called it the search for “the heartbeat” beneath all the calculations. Rahău found it in the response of students and audiences. Luxford located it in the long encounter with an artist, sometimes unfolding over several years before a work finally reaches the stage.

The future of the big festival may depend less on protecting the model inherited from the 20th century than on having the courage to answer that question honestly.