MONDAY

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The State of Things: The opening day establishes a shared picture of Australia’s independent theatre and performance landscape. Before attempting to propose solutions, we begin by asking where we are now. What is happening to the artform? How does the independent ecology actually function? What wider social, cultural, political and technological forces are shaping the work and the conditions under which it is made? Monday creates a common language for the week while making room for the very different experiences held across the sector.

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Opening: The Symposium begins with an Acknowledgement of Country, welcome, host framing and opening remarks. This first gathering introduces the purpose and structure of the week and invites delegates to think beyond their immediate projects and organisations towards the ecology as a whole.

 

Provocation Stack: The Art, The Ecology, The World

Three short provocations establish a broad view of the current moment.

The Art asks what theatre is doing, becoming, testing and perhaps forgetting. It considers the forms, ideas and ways of working currently emerging from independent practice.

The Ecology turns towards the system surrounding the work: the relationships, structures and conditions through which independent performance is developed, produced and sustained.

The World places theatre within the wider forces shaping contemporary life, including politics, technology, changing social conditions and shifting modes of attention and gathering.

Together, the provocations give the room several vantage points from which to begin the week.

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Concurrent Sessions: What Are We Making Now?

A conversation about current forms, authorship and the artistic movements shaping contemporary independent practice. What kinds of theatre and performance are emerging? How are artists working across text, devising, digital practice, interdisciplinary form and new relationships with audiences? What feels alive, urgent or newly possible?

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Say the Quiet Part Out Loud

An honest conversation about the contradictions, pressures and unspoken truths of making work now.

This session creates space to name the things the sector often knows but does not always say clearly. It may include questions of labour, ambition, competition, institutional relationships and the gap between the values the sector promotes and the conditions artists experience.

The aim is not simply to complain, but to make the realities of the ecology visible enough that they can be addressed.

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What Is the Ecology?

A practical attempt to map the people, organisations and relationships that make independent practice possible. The independent sector is frequently discussed as though everyone shares the same understanding of what it contains. This session asks who is actually part of the ecology, how its different parts relate to one another and where labour, knowledge, responsibility and resources currently sit.

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Full-Cohort Panel: Independent Ecology

The full cohort comes together to consider how the independent ecology works, where it is healthy or overburdened and where responsibility, resources and support sit.

The conversation examines the ecology as an interconnected system rather than a collection of individual organisations or projects.

Where are relationships genuinely reciprocal? Where is the system dependent on unpaid or under-recognised labour? Who carries risk, and who benefits from the work generated within independent practice?

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Daily Harvest: The first Daily Harvest gathers the key questions and tensions emerging from the opening day. Rather than attempting to resolve them immediately, the Harvest identifies the ideas that need to remain active as the Symposium moves into questions of audience, value and sustainability.

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Evening: Social Event

An optional social event offers delegates an informal opportunity to meet, reconnect and continue conversations outside the formal program.

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TUESDAY

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Audiences, Invitation, Values and Sustainability

Tuesday turns towards the people who encounter the work.

Who is the audience now? How are changing patterns of attention, participation, trust and cultural engagement affecting theatre? What do we actually know about the people who attend, the people who do not and the conditions that shape those decisions?

The day approaches audience not as a marketing problem to be solved at the end of a creative process, but as a relationship that begins with the work itself.

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Morning Check-In

Coffee with Margi. The day begins with an informal check-in hosted by Dr Margi Brown Ash.

Delegates are invited to reflect on what has stayed with them from Monday and to arrive together before the next set of provocations begins.

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Provocation Stack: Who Is the Audience Now?

Three provocations approach contemporary audiences from different perspectives.

The New Spectator considers how people now engage with art, entertainment, media and public life. It looks at changing attention, digital culture, identity, trust and the many demands competing for an audience’s time. Invitation and Trust asks what makes someone feel that an artistic experience is for them. How do language, context, reputation, relationships and previous experiences influence whether someone says yes? Who Is Actually Coming? introduces an evidence-based perspective on audience behaviour, motivation, barriers and cultural participation. What does current research tell us, and where might our assumptions be wrong?

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Concurrent Sessions: Making Work for Audience and Community

How do specificity, community and cultural context shape who a work speaks to and how it invites them in? Rather than pursuing an imagined general audience, this session asks what becomes possible when artists are clear about who the work is speaking with, where it is situated and what responsibilities accompany that relationship.

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Audience, Visibility and the Work Itself: How do self-producing, touring and audience response reshape an artist’s practice and the work itself? Independent artists frequently move between creative, producing, administrative and promotional roles. This session explores how those overlapping responsibilities affect the work, how audience response becomes part of an artist’s knowledge and how visibility can be built without separating it from artistic practice.

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Access All Audiences: Access is not simply something added once a work has been completed. It can be an artistic methodology that transforms form, participation and audience experience. This session examines how access can be embedded from the beginning of a process, and how disability-led and access-led approaches can expand the imaginative possibilities of performance.

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Concurrent Sessions:

Audience Is Society: Audiences do not exist separately from the social, political and cultural conditions around them.

This session asks how artists create work that responds to time, place, circumstance and urgency. How might theatre engage with the society in which it is made without becoming didactic, reactive or overly simplified?

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Artist-Driven Making for Audiences: How can artists build genuine audience relationships without flattening ambition, complexity or artistic integrity? This session explores audience development from the artist’s perspective. It asks how makers can remain attentive to the people encountering their work while protecting risk, experimentation and the particular demands of their practice.

 

Relevance vs Integrity: Who decides what matters? This conversation examines how ideas of relevance, accessibility, taste, difficulty and cultural value are formed. It asks whether responding to audiences necessarily compromises artistic integrity, and how artists navigate the expectations of presenters, funders, critics and communities without reducing the work to what is immediately legible or marketable.

 

Daily Harvest

Tuesday’s Harvest gathers what has emerged about contemporary audiences, invitation and value.

The cohort will consider how these questions might change the way work is conceived, made, communicated and sustained.

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Evening Session

Financial Literacy: A practical financial literacy session for artistic sole traders and micro and small theatre companies and organisations.

The session addresses the financial realities of independent practice in a direct and shame-free way, offering useful frameworks for understanding money, planning, budgeting, cash flow and sustainable working structures.

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WEDNESDAY

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Ecology and Interdependence

Wednesday examines how work moves through the sector and who carries it along the way.

Independent practice does not exist in isolation. It develops through relationships with producers, venues, festivals, funding bodies, communities, institutions and regional, national and international networks. The day asks how these relationships function, where they break down and what forms of infrastructure are needed if work is to develop beyond a single project or season.

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Morning Check-In

Coffee with Margi. The morning check-in creates space to reflect on the first two days and identify connections between artistic practice, audiences and the structures surrounding the work.

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Provocation Stack

Who Carries the Work?

Three perspectives examine the systems and relationships through which independent work is made, supported and circulated. Institutions and Independent Ecology considers the relationship between independent artists and larger organisations. Where is there genuine exchange, and where do misunderstandings, unequal expectations or structural imbalances remain?

Regional and Place-Based Ecology looks beyond metropolitan touring models to consider practice grounded in place, local relationships and regional cultural ecosystems.

National Infrastructure, the Missing Middle and Cultural Policy asks what happens between the creation of a work and its longer-term development, circulation or international life. Where are the producing structures, strategic resources and policy settings that allow work to move?

 

Concurrent Sessions

Negotiating and Navigating Cultural Policy: How does cultural policy work, and how does it change?

This session demystifies the systems through which government priorities, public investment and cultural strategy are developed. It considers how independent artists and organisations might engage with policy more confidently and strategically, rather than only encountering it through individual funding applications.

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Deficit Mapping: A practical systems-mapping process identifying gaps, pressure points, strengths, missing infrastructure and opportunities across the independent ecology.

Rather than asking only what is going wrong, this session examines where the ecology becomes fragile, what is already working and where targeted change might have the greatest impact.

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Is Australia an Island?: A conversation about developing international relationships, exchange and touring pathways. Australia’s geographic distance can create practical barriers, but it can also encourage distinctive forms of collaboration and exchange. This session asks how independent artists might build meaningful international relationships and how work can circulate beyond Australia without international engagement becoming available only to the best-resourced organisations.

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Full-Cohort Panel

Independents, Majors and Festivals

This panel examines the relationships, responsibilities and exchanges between independent artists, major organisations, venues and festivals.

The conversation considers how risk, labour, resources, knowledge and visibility move between different parts of the sector.

What does genuine reciprocity look like? What responsibilities accompany the presentation or development of independent work? How can these relationships become more transparent, sustainable and artist-centred?

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Daily Harvest

Wednesday’s Harvest draws together the systemic gaps, strengths and leverage points identified throughout the day.

The cohort will begin to consider where shared priorities or collective intervention might be possible.

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THURSDAY

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Artform, Community, Access and Collective Futures

Thursday turns towards change.

What new forms, communities and working conditions are emerging? How can artists build collective power across a sector defined by freelance, independent and often fragmented labour?

How do access, cultural leadership, community, technology and political action reshape not only what is made, but the structures through which it is made?

The day moves from examining how change happens to imagining what different conditions might look like.

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Morning Check-In

Coffee with Margi. The morning begins with an opportunity to reflect on the systems mapped on Wednesday and identify the questions that now require imagination, courage or collective action.

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Provocation Stack

How Change Happens

Three provocations examine how artists, workers and communities create meaningful structural change.

Collective Action and Cultural Influence looks at advocacy, public value and the ways a diverse sector might build influence without flattening difference.

New Models and New Structures examines alternative approaches to organising, producing, sharing resources and building infrastructure.

Worker Power and Collective Conditions considers what solidarity might look like among freelance, precarious and independent workers whose needs vary, but whose working conditions are deeply connected.

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Full-Cohort Panel

New Forms: A conversation about contemporary forms, access, cultural practice, community, technology and the conditions needed for new work.

The panel asks how the artform is changing in response to the world around it. It considers the influence of digital culture, disability-led practice, cultural specificity, popular form, expanded performance and new relationships between artist and audience. It also asks what kinds of organisational and material conditions are required if these forms are to grow.

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Concurrent Afternoon Sessions

Staying Brave: Activism and Experimentation. How do artists remain brave without burning out?

This conversation brings activism, experimentation, collective care and artistic courage into the same room. It asks how bold practice can be sustained over time, particularly when artists are already carrying heavy personal, political and professional demands.

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Utopia Building: A participatory workshop moving from diagnosis towards collective imagination, possibility and action. Having spent much of the week examining current realities, this session invites delegates to speculate more freely. What might a stronger, fairer and more ambitious ecology look like? What would need to change, and what could begin now?

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Daily Harvest

Thursday’s Harvest gathers the possibilities that have emerged and prepares the cohort for the final day.

Delegates will also be invited to nominate themselves to offer short provocations on Friday morning, ensuring that the closing day is shaped by the people who have participated in the full week.

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Evening

Artist Screening and Q&A

An optional artist screening and Q&A is currently being explored.

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FRIDAY

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Moving Forward, Deliberately. Friday asks what continues. The final day is not designed to produce a single manifesto or force the room into artificial consensus. Instead, it creates space to identify what has become clearer, what relationships should continue and where responsibility for future action might sit.

The day moves from participant reflection into practical connection, shared priorities and next steps.

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Morning Check-In

Coffee with Margi. The final morning check-in allows delegates to take stock of the week and prepare for a day led more directly by the cohort.

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Delegate-Led Provocations

A series of short provocations from delegates draws together the strongest questions, discoveries and responsibilities that have emerged across the week.

Delegates will respond to four guiding questions:

• What has become clear?

• What forms come next?

• What can continue?

• What is our responsibility to the future?

These are not intended as polished presentations. They are concise invitations to think, respond and carry particular ideas into the final conversations.

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Full-Cohort Session

Reinforcing Our Networks

A practical session identifying relationships, alliances and forms of connection that can continue beyond the Symposium.

The independent ecology already contains deep knowledge and expertise, but that knowledge is frequently dispersed. This session considers how participants might remain connected, share resources and support work across regions, disciplines and organisational contexts.

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Full-Cohort Session

We Are the 99%

The independent sector represents a vast proportion of the artists, projects, knowledge and creative activity within Australian performance, while often remaining under-resourced and under-represented within decision-making structures.

This session asks what becomes possible when independent practitioners recognise their collective scale, knowledge and influence.

It will identify shared priorities and consider where coordinated advocacy or collective action might be useful.

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Full-Cohort Action Session

Future Seeding / Future Stages: Where to Now?

The final working session moves from conversation into continuation.

Delegates will report back on emerging priorities, identify practical next steps and establish who might carry particular conversations forward.

The aim is not to solve every issue raised during the week, but to ensure that the Symposium produces relationships, commitments and actions that can continue after everyone leaves the room.

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Closing Drinks and Farewell

The week concludes with closing drinks, reflection and farewell.