Ahead of the Curve: Curating Independent Festivals in a Changing World

At SIPAM’s “Ahead of the Curve” panel, festival leaders from Romania, France and Egypt examined the increasingly unstable bargain at the heart of independent culture: the freedom to choose, create and dissent still depends on money, institutions, political conditions and the patient work of building an audience.

The word independent carries an attractive promise in the arts. It suggests freedom from institutional caution, political interference and the demands of the market. Yet, for the people who build festivals outside traditional structures, independence is rarely an absolute condition. It is a daily negotiation with funders, public authorities, sponsors, venues, audiences and the cost of keeping an artistic idea alive.

That contradiction shaped “Ahead of the Curve: Curating Independent Festivals in a Changing World,” a panel held on 23 June during the Sibiu International Performing Arts Market (SIPAM). Moderated by Hege Knarvik Sande, CEO of Performing Arts Hub Norway, the discussion brought together Chris Simion and Tiberiu Mercurian of Undercloud Independent Theatre Festival, Harold David of Avignon Off, Mazen El Gharabawy of the Sharm El Sheikh International Theatre Festival for Youth, and Erwin Șimșensohn, general manager of Constanța State Theatre and president of SEAS – the Performing Arts Summer Season.

Sande began by questioning the apparent simplicity of the panel’s central term. Independence, she argued, contains two ideas at once: artistic freedom and a relationship to power. “Independence always implies a relationship to something: a system, an institution, a funder, a government, a market or an audience,” she said. “So, you are independent from whom, and dependent on what?”

Her own Norwegian context complicated a familiar assumption. In Norway, strong public support is regarded not as the opposite of independence but as one of its conditions, provided politicians remain at a distance from artistic decisions. Around the table, however, the same word described markedly different realities. 

Undercloud began 18 years ago as a platform for independent theatre in Bucharest and will reach its nineteenth edition in 2026. Representing the festival alongside director Chris Simion, producer Tiberiu Mercurian described independence first as curatorial autonomy: “For us, it means having the freedom to choose whatever performance we would like.”

The financial structure behind that freedom has nevertheless changed. Undercloud evolved from a festival financed entirely through private resources to one whose budget is now supported, in a proportion of roughly 40 to 50 percent, through a local public funding programme. That support is valuable, but its annual timetable creates uncertainty. Funding decisions arrive in spring, after the state budget has been established, while conversations with companies and private supporters follow their own unpredictable calendar.

“We are applying each year for funds from the local authority, and that drives a certain unpredictability,” Mercurian explained. “You do not know until March, April or May whether you will receive private funds either. This is the environment in which we live.”

For Undercloud, the most direct definition remained freedom from state interference. Yet the festival’s experience also showed that autonomy is not necessarily secured by refusing public money. It depends on whether the funding mechanism protects curatorial decisions and arrives early enough to allow meaningful planning.

At Avignon Off, independence has a different genealogy. David traced it to a single artist who, excluded from the official Festival d’Avignon, chose to produce and present his own work on its fringes. “He said: ‘I am not curated by the official festival, so I will promote my show myself, produce it and present it to the audience without being curated by anybody other than myself,’” David recalled. “This principle – not to be curated by someone other than yourself – was the DNA of Avignon Off.”

Six decades later, that gesture has become an enormous ecosystem. The 2026 edition marks the festival’s sixtieth anniversary, with almost 1,000 shows, around 98 percent of them produced by the participating companies and producers. Artists purchase the freedom to appear by assuming the financial risk themselves.

“We are in a world where independence and freedom are based on being able to produce your own performance,” David said. “Money is a key to independence in this case, with everything that means for companies and producers.”

Avignon Off does not curate the programme in the conventional sense. The association David leads coordinates the festival and attempts to establish shared rules across a vast field of venues, producers and companies. Its task is to prevent freedom from becoming merely an unregulated marketplace – or, in David’s formulation, “a jungle based only on supply and demand.” Independence without safeguards can reproduce the very inequalities it claims to escape: those with greater resources can take larger risks, remain longer and command more visibility.

Șimșensohn entered the conversation by acknowledging that SEAS did not fit neatly into the independent category. The Constanța festival is financed more than 90 percent through public funds, yet he argued that this support has created a meaningful form of independence because local authorities have not intervened in its artistic choices.

“We have had serious public funding and enough funding to create this festival for the last five years,” he said. “They have absolutely no interference in curating the festival. That gives us enough independence not only to curate it, but to strategise and create our own values.”

SEAS stretches across nine to eleven weeks during the summer and includes theatre, opera, performances for children, indoor and outdoor work, and a dedicated street arts section. Its 2026 programme also places a stronger emphasis on accessibility, both through productions dealing with disability and through measures that make performances accessible to disabled spectators.

For Șimșensohn, public money also protects the festival from another source of control: the market. “We are not under the pressure of the market and the demands of the audience, because once we fall under that pressure, we risk curating only what sells,” he said. Rather than taking its values directly from existing demand, SEAS can invest in building new audiences, including communities that have not previously been addressed by cultural programming.

Private sponsorship, he added, is not automatically freer than state support. Corporate social responsibility strategies often come with annual themes and preferred lines of action. A company may agree to support a festival only if the programme contains work aligned with its current priorities. “That is already some kind of dependence,” Șimșensohn observed. “The fact that we have strong public funding is actually the best guarantee of independence.”

He mentioned that this model works only when politicians refrain from making artistic decisions. That separation cannot be taken for granted across Romania. Șimșensohn said that other theatre managers and festival directors have faced significant political pressure, making SEAS’s relationship with its local funders a fortunate case rather than a national norm.

For El Gharabawy, the founder and chairman of the Sharm El Sheikh International Theatre Festival for Youth, independence is defined less by separation from institutions than by the ability to gather them around a platform for emerging artists.

“Independence in our definition is not isolation,” he said. “We cooperate with institutions, municipalities, audiences, sponsors, governments, artists and international networks. SETFI is a platform for young voices and young theatre-makers from different countries.” Its artistic decisions, he stressed, continue to be guided by cultural values, artistic quality and opportunities for emerging artists.

That collaborative model arose partly from the particular geography of Sharm El Sheikh. When the festival began eleven years ago, the tourist city had no suitable theatre venue and no established local theatre audience. The organisers started with street and non-traditional performances, then worked with the Ministry of Culture, government bodies and sponsors to develop a venue. Only then could they begin the slower process of cultivating spectators.

“It takes a lot of time to build audiences, year after year,” El Gharabawy said. The festival now has a database of more than 5,000 audience members in a city with approximately 20,000 permanent residents. Its growth has also taken an international form, with related initiatives in Kraków, Tbilisi and Budapest and further expansion planned.

This approach reframed dependence as a network rather than a weakness. The festival remains artistically independent not by standing alone, but by ensuring that none of its partnerships displaces its central commitment to young theatre-makers.

If independence is never absolute, the decisive question becomes how its compromises alter the art itself. Across the panel, funding emerged also as a force that changes duration, scale, form and subject matter.

Undercloud’s greatest constraint is predictability. The festival’s curatorial process begins with an open call, followed by selection from a team that assesses work by independent companies. This mechanism preserves the artistic choice, but unstable finances have limited its ability to sustain an international programme. “There was a time when our financing was more predictable and we could contact international companies,” Mercurian said. “In the years since the pandemic, it has become very difficult. The predictability of funding is our main challenge.” The compromise is therefore not necessarily visible inside the national selection. It appears in the work that cannot be invited, the partnerships that cannot be confirmed and the international dimension that must be postponed.

At Avignon Off, the economic contraction is visible on stage. David noted that companies increasingly attend for only half the festival, sharing performance slots with others to reduce costs. The result is a larger number of titles, but shorter runs for individual productions. The composition of the festival has changed too: publicly supported companies that once had little need for Avignon now attend in search of touring opportunities, while more commercial producers have also entered the programme.

Most strikingly, participation is becoming less a path towards a future tour than a means of ensuring that a production has any life at all. “The motivation is not only to find opportunities to disseminate your show after the festival, but simply to exist,” David said. “If you do not take the risk of going to Avignon Off, maybe your show will be created, but its life will be very short.”

The pressure also affects artistic form. According to David, more than 60 percent of Avignon Off productions now feature fewer than three performers. Smaller casts, lighter sets and reduced technical requirements make work cheaper to present and easier for prospective buyers to tour. Economic calculation has entered the creative process before the production reaches the stage.

It has entered subject matter as well. “There is self-censorship,” David warned. “An artist may think: if I create a show based on this topic, I will have fewer opportunities for it to tour. So I will censor myself just to be sure I have a chance to survive.”

Here, the panel’s two principal dangers converged. Economic precarity can make artists avoid difficult subjects, while political power can block the dissemination of those who continue to address them.

David described an increasingly contested environment in France, where local political leaders may refuse work that does not align with their ideological position. With presidential elections approaching and parties hostile to cultural freedom gaining ground, he saw the defence of creative and distributive independence as an urgent civic responsibility. “Our responsibility today is to tell audiences, artists, producers and venues that freedom of creation, and the possibility for the audience to access every kind of discourse, are absolutely essential,” he said. Culture, in this understanding, is not an ornament to democratic life but part of the way citizens learn to choose: what they want to see, where they want to go and how they wish to understand the world.

Șimșensohn identified the rise of the far right as the greatest future threat to publicly supported festivals in Romania. The current pressure, he argued, is compounded by an economic and political climate in which culture remains marginal. He placed Romania’s allocation to culture at approximately 0.07 percent of GDP, contrasting it with discussions about substantially increasing military expenditure.

“Every time parties negotiate a new government, the Ministry of Culture is the last one they talk about,” he said. “Nobody is interested in it. At the end, it becomes an exchange coin: ‘Take the Ministry of Culture if you are not happy with everything else we gave you.’ It is the Cinderella of the government.”

The immediate programming of SEAS has not yet been altered by this fear. The concern is what may follow the 2028 electoral cycle: new local administrations, changed funding priorities and more direct attempts to translate ideology into cultural policy. “It does not look good,” Șimșensohn said. “I am a bit scared about what is going to happen after the next elections.”

His warning sharpened the distinction between present autonomy and structural security. A festival may be independent today and still remain profoundly vulnerable to tomorrow’s election result.

The discussion eventually moved from survival to responsibility. If independent festivals claim a special relationship with freedom, what do they owe the places in which they operate when the event itself is over?

For Undercloud, the answer is increasingly rooted in Grivița 53, the new theatre created by Simion and Mercurian and opened in December 2025. The venue gives the festival a permanent infrastructure after years of working across borrowed spaces. More importantly, it enables Undercloud to imagine growth not only through scale or international visibility, but through deeper participation in its Bucharest neighbourhood.

“We found our role in the community, and we want to serve that community further and better,” Mercurian said. “We want to develop the Grivița neighbourhood with our productions and the productions we invite, but we want to go one step further: to invite the community to create performances and play them within the festival.” Undercloud would thus offer not only a platform on which artists perform for local residents, but a structure through which those residents can become cultural producers themselves.

A permanent venue also addresses one of the less visible weaknesses of festival work: maintaining a skilled team throughout the year. “When you have a festival that lasts ten days, it is very difficult to find quality people who want to join,” Mercurian explained. “Since we have the venue, we can use the theatre’s resources and infrastructure for Undercloud.” The festival can now function as a scouting platform for the theatre, while the theatre gives continuity to the festival’s relationships, team and artistic research.

At Constanța State Theatre, the connection is already organic. SEAS lasts two and a half months, but its audience-development work continues through the theatre’s annual repertoire, premieres and productions. “We do not create entertainment – that is not why we are there,” Șimșensohn said. “Our strategy focuses on building younger audiences and finding ways to engage with what is going on around us.”

SEAS itself emerged from a crisis that forced the institution to reconsider what a festival could be. Before the pandemic, Constanța had a dense ten-day event. Health restrictions made that model impossible, so the team found unconventional outdoor venues and spread the programme across several weeks. The first version was called Best Summer Art Fest, producing the acronym Be.Safe. As restrictions eased, the name changed, but the expanded structure remained.

“We realised that we had created something new, something that worked,” Șimșensohn said. “We did not go back to the ten-day festival.” What began as an emergency adaptation became a distinctive summer season and, in his words, a national cultural brand with international ambitions.

Asked whether independent festivals are truly “ahead of the curve,” the panelists resisted a single forecast. Their answers suggested that the future will not be defined simply by smaller budgets or larger networks, but by how quickly festivals can convert vulnerability into new forms of artistic and civic action.

For El Gharabawy, financial pressure has encouraged SETFI to seek new relationships between theatre and cultural investment, as well as collaborations with audiovisual production. For Undercloud, the future lies in using a new permanent theatre to transfer creative agency to its neighbourhood. Avignon Off faces the harder task of defending openness while preventing financial risk from narrowing who can participate and what they dare to make.

Șimșensohn offered the discussion’s clearest defence of why such festivals remain necessary. “We need independent culture in order to remain sane in the current society,” he said. “We need independence in order to fight what is going on in the world, of course with our own means.”

He had observed a troubling reduction in the scale of Romanian productions, with fewer large-cast performances available for big stages. Yet the same season had brought him work that was more courageous in its themes: productions about war, economic insecurity, disability and other urgent realities.

“The shows are smaller, but at the same time the productions are more courageous,” he said. “As curators, we need to make sure they are part of our festivals. We need to take all the problems we have and transform them into opportunities. This is the way to survive.”

The panel ultimately dismantled the romantic idea of an independent festival as one that owes nothing to anyone. Every festival represented in Sibiu was embedded in systems of money, politics, infrastructure and public expectation. The more useful measure of independence was not isolation, but the ability to choose one’s values openly, protect artistic decisions from interference and build relationships without surrendering the mission that made those relationships worth having.

Being ahead of the curve, then, may mean recognising dependence early enough to negotiate it. It means understanding that public money can secure freedom or undermine it; that private sponsorship can enable art or quietly redirect it; that a large open platform can democratise access while transferring risk onto artists; and that a festival’s most enduring work may begin after its final performance.