It won’t come as a surprise to people working in touring that the old business models are straining under the pressure of years of standstill funding and local government cuts. Most touring houses and many touring companies are operating at a loss.
One of the effects of this strain is that tours are shorter and increasingly concentrated in large urban centres, undermining the core purpose of touring to improve access and redistribute cultural opportunity more fairly.
In our recent research and report for Arts Council England on The State of Touring (in collaboration with MyCake, Data Thistle and associates Deborah Chadbourn and Emma Dunton), we heard from hundreds of people across the touring sector.
They were very frank about the scale of the polycrisis they face: rising costs and falling funds; political challenges in the switch to place-based policies; big shifts in audience preferences and behaviours; technological change they are ill-equipped to harness. Such scarcity of resources may also account for the emergence of the more dog-eat-dog culture in the touring ecosystem which many had witnessed.
And while these challenges are common across the wider cultural sector, they are more acute in touring, not least because part of its raison d’etre is to operate beyond the market.
Delivering on cultural rights
Touring matters because it goes where the population is sparse, brings what is emerging and widens the variety for all. It creates new entry points and creative cross fertilisation everywhere, beyond the cultural agglomeration enjoyed exclusively by the big cities.
In other words, touring has a vital role to play delivering on cultural rights, in the strict UNESCO sense of the term, the right of everyone to access, create, participate in and enjoy culture.
This is one of the reasons we call for a radical rethink in the State of Touring report, not just for more, and more focused, resources but a new manifesto for touring which recognises its potential and the conditions under which it can thrive.
It was therefore good to see that Arts Council England has recognised both the value of touring and the need to change in their new Strategic Framework: “We believe that a healthy touring ecology is vital in ensuring that communities everywhere have access to high quality work. In 2026/27 we will begin a roll-out of a new Touring Service to help recharge our touring sector, so that it is better able to innovate, take risks and strengthen its offer to audiences.”
Doing things differently
If the service is to succeed, the emphasis will need to be on significantly de-risking experimentation, actively and financially supporting collaboration and peer support, backing authentically audience-centred innovation, and enabling all of this with the technology now available.
There is no doubt many touring venues and organisations will need to do things differently, and it’s important to acknowledge that any kind of change is challenging when resources are scarce, and reserves are low.
Changing business model, perhaps redesigning ways of working which have been in play for decades, is going to be really hard. But there are reasons for optimism.
Reasons for optimism
Some parts of the sector are flourishing, especially high volume and large-scale work with broad appeal, proving that touring can be commercially viable. For some, there will be opportunities to build on this more income-generating model. Roll-out of the Incentivising Touring scheme, is evidence of Arts Council England’s own willingness to do things differently, on the basis of a good idea tested in the field.
Others are finding more sustainable models by developing an income-generation strand to their work that complements their necessarily subsidised work. We heard several examples where companies have received large-scale commissions – e.g. by a heritage network for a programme of performances challenging the colonial history of each of their properties, or an orchestra undertaking long term learning programmes alongside performances in a priority place.
Concerns about the role of touring in a world focused on creative place-making were frequently raised in our consultation. But we also heard from companies who were taking this as an inspiration to make work which connects with and between communities in different locations across the country, including designing long-lead co-creative work in places as part of the tour – and connections between different communities.
Collaboration as a route forward
Many of these new approaches involve a more collaborative way of working. We heard about partnerships between venues and companies making a much longer-term commitment to each other, able to support each other both in the R&D of artistic product and audience development.
But we noticed that sustainability and innovation were thriving with the support of multi-partnership touring models – like the South East’s house, Dance Touring Partnership and Venues North.
They show the way, not just in terms of transactional support like shared services (operational, tour-booking, for marketing, research etc) but also acting as dynamic hubs for creative exchange, raising visibility, joint funding, scaling work, peer support and data-driven audience development.
There are more, and more ambitious, examples we might look to across Europe – including Spain’s La Red (the Network), a powerhouse for effective touring, and the Netherlands’ brilliant DiP (Digital Information Platform for Performing Arts) harnessing data and tech to simplify and inform every aspect of touring.
Another important route will be to support mergers, whether vertically (controlling more of the whole value chain) or horizontally (greater scale at one particular point in the chain).
Audience-centred innovation
Whatever the model, it seems that audience-centred innovation will need to be part of the mix. There was a strong consensus among research respondents that good touring used to be about responding to different audience needs around the country, but we observed a low level of audience knowledge.
And this also touches on a key distinction raised by consultees: the different meanings of ‘risky’ work. This could mean work that might be commercial, but where the outcome is uncertain, or work that is certain not to be commercial. Similarly, there is a distinction between ‘niche’ work that requires subsidy because it genuinely caters for an audience not currently being served, and work which is super-serving already-engaged audiences but lacks wider appeal.
How to respond to these distinctions is ultimately a policy question: about what art should be supported, for whom and why. But when the financial situation has changed so dramatically, for organisations and the public, these fundamental questions are inevitably part of the conversation about what to do.
The way forward
Being able to embrace risk is critical to the future of touring and its contribution to cultural rights. Collaborating to make the most of available resource centres the needs of audiences, which embraces, rather than attempts to avoid, risk.
This article was first published on Arts Professional 29 June 2026
