In response to Bel’s campaign against air travel in the performing arts, actor and director Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez highlighted the risk that this would further marginalise artists from the global south: “Your proposal would mean yet a greater concentration of resources and cultural capital in the richest cities of the world. It would mean that Europe would become, even more so, an island of harder and harder access, one that can barely listen to what happens away from its shores.”

Rather than giving up on international touring altogether, many makers are viewing this tension as an opportunity for creative reinvention, from practical changes in how they minimise travel impact to more systemic approaches that challenge the established touring model and explore new artistic possibilities. Resources such as Theatre Green Book’s Touring Toolkit help producers reduce the environmental impact of every aspect of their tour. ‘Green riders’ are another recent innovation: a contractual clause outlining the environmental commitments companies expect their venues to meet.

Staying longer in tour locations

‘Deep touring’ is one of the models explored by participants in the ITER programme, a collaboration between Julie’s Bicycle, Arts Council England, Arts and Culture Norway and the Danish Arts Foundation, which brings companies together from the three countries to explore innovative solutions to the challenge of sustainable touring. 

“The idea of deep touring is spending longer rooted within an area or with a community, potentially co-developing the artwork with those communities. Or touring within a smaller area and really slowing down the process. That can be a really rewarding experience for an artist,” Hazlewood says. She points to choreographer Claire Benson’s dance work Plastic Paradiso; not only did the company travel to Aarhaus in Denmark from Bournemouth via electric vehicle, cutting emissions by two-thirds, Benson also extended her stay by a week to deliver puppetry and movement workshops for 129 children.

Cost is obviously a barrier to deep touring models. The flight for Benson from London would have taken 1.5 hours and cost £300, far cheaper than paying for artist time, per diems, overnight accommodation, tickets, car hire and charging. It can also be a challenge to find tour dates that align with this model. ‘Exclusion zones’, which prevent companies from performing within a certain radius of a venue close to the dates they are booked to perform, have been a historical barrier. Increasingly, as venues programme later and programming budgets fall, companies find themselves with less agency over the dates they take.
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Eco’Operation, a platform that launched last month, seeks to address this challenge in the outdoor arts sector. It is a network of outdoor festivals in Europe aiming to connect organisers in order to stimulate more sustainable touring. With more than 90 festivals subscribed, including 11 in the UK, Eco’Operation allows organisers to see which artists are already in the area and connect directly to offer more dates. In addition to reducing emissions, collaborating to bring artists into the country reduces travel, production, freight and carnet costs, and gives smaller festivals the opportunity to present works that they might not otherwise be able to afford. “They can share the cost as well as the carbon impact,” says Sho Shibata, director of Outdoor Arts UK, one of the lead partners on the enterprise. 

It is a reminder that the shift to doing things in a more environmentally sustainable way often brings a broader array of benefits. In 2021, Fuel Theatre undertook a tour around the UK in an electric van. The blog it published about it at the time was a frank account of the difficulties they faced (it is worth noting that the range and efficiency of EVs have increased significantly over the past five years). 

But for Stuart Heyes, a sustainable production expert who was Fuel’s associate director at the time, one of the benefits of touring in a more eco-conscious fashion is how it shifts the company away from a rhythm of working that has never been sustainable, disrupting models informed by capitalist imperatives. Of the breaks imposed by the wait for the electric van to recharge, he says: “In that gap, you discover a different time zone, you discover the heartbeat of the world is racing to this commercial metronome.

“Suddenly, you have stepped off that, you’re into the world of canals and pathways. Suddenly, you’re entering the pace of nature, all because you chose to use an electric vehicle.” He advocates for a culture of sustainability that learns through doing rather than theorising – making mistakes and learning along the way. “I call it being turquoise, rather than being green.”

Radical approaches

‘Concept touring’ is an even more radical approach than deep touring, embracing the environmental imperative as an invitation to total reimagining. Introduced by London International Festival of Theatre during the pandemic, it is a model where the idea or process travels, but the artist does not. One of the commissions was ZU-UK’s Radio Ghost, an audio-driven, app-based walking game about consumerism with no live performers. Another recent example is 2023’s A Play for the Living in the Time of Extinction, directed by Mitchell, a ‘zero travel’ touring production that was remounted by a local performer and creative team at every venue. 

Not all companies will feel able to reinvent the way they make and tour work so completely. Yet the scale of the emergency that we are facing demands that companies look at every aspect of how they work, considering deeply the climate impacts. I asked Shibata whether he felt international touring, following a more carbon-intensive model, can still be justified. He spoke to a concern that the perceived importance of international touring hasn’t been properly evaluated. “There isn’t really a cost-benefit analysis as such,” he says. “Those are the kinds of things I would like researchers to pick up to help us move the dialogue forward.” 

For me, the solutions to transformation in the international touring context must be as varied as the companies and artworks themselves. What our era surely demands is that we bring an informed and genuine curiosity to the challenges we face, reaching a position of integrity that responds to the specifics of each situation. Along the way, we may discover that rethinking touring models through an ecological lens leads us to a better international performance sector entirely – one that is more creative, kind and impactful.