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Perform Europe: reimagining international touring in performing arts
Joris Janssens
Senior Expert Culture & Regional Development
"Perform Europe is a collective learning environment for the performing arts community in the whole creative Europe region, to experiment with and share experiences in relation to the fight against climate change and more inclusive approaches."
The challenge
Perform Europe is a fund to support innovative projects for cross-border touring and distribution of performing arts works, in a sustainable, inclusive, fair and innovative way across the 40 Creative Europe countries. The aim of Perform Europe is to support the development of practices that are rooted in sustainability and inclusivity to contribute to the transformations of the performing arts sector and to ensure a balanced distribution across the Creative Europe region.
IDEA Consult is part of the managing consortium, together with these European performing arts networks: International network for contemporary performing arts (IETM), the European Dance Development Network (EDN), European Festivals Association (EFA), Circostrada and Pearle* (Live Performance Europe).
The first edition of Perform Europe took place in the period 2020-2022. It supported 19 partnerships in the broader transition of the European performing arts sector towards a more sustainable, inclusive and fair approach for cross-border touring and presentation.
Following the success of the pilot edition, Perform Europe was relaunched in 2023. Perform Europe’s €2.1 million fund will be granted to at least 35 successful partnerships.
The process & results
IDEA Consult is the research partner in the consortium. In the first edition, IDEA conducted a co-creative field study, mapping trends in the cross-border distribution of performing arts in Europe.
In the second edition of Perform Europe, IDEA facilitated a monitoring process with selected participants to share their project learnings and innovations with the broader performing arts community and policy stakeholders. This process focuses on learning, knowledge creation, monitoring, and evaluation at both the project level and the Perform Europe initiative as a whole.
The objectives were:
- Share evaluation outcomes with the performing arts sector and stakeholders.
- Contribute to the transition towards more sustainable, fair, and inclusive practices.
Perform Europe 2 employs the reflexive monitoring methodology developed by DRIFT. This approach provides real-time insights into project progress and helps monitor and evaluate transformative solutions. The methodology has been tailored specifically for Perform Europe.
In 2026, the co-creative learning and monitoring process will consolidate all learnings and evaluations in an evaluation report, including policy recommendations and a reflexive monitoring guidebook with a detailed process to implement sustainable touring and distribution projects.
More information:
Partners in this project
