Arts Council England pilots Incentivising Touring scheme

Arts Council England (ACE) has launched a £5 million scheme aiming to support regional touring in England. Incentivising Touring: Repayable Grants for Theatre and Dance will offer repayable grants of up to 25% of a production’s capitalisation costs (to a maximum of £500k) in an effort to reduce the risk of touring large-scale productions around the country.

It is hoped the funding will boost the confidence of boards and investors, prompting an increase in tours and wider investment. If supported tours are commercially successful, the grant will be returned to ACE to be reinvested in future tours and the pilot will inform the development of a longer-term programme. The Incentivising Touring Scheme is launched alongside a major new research study focusing on the current touring landscape.

ACE director of touring Hannah Lake said: ‘As the national development agency for arts and culture, an important part of our role is to have close dialogue and work with the many different parts of the sector to develop ways to best support their work. Touring high quality work at scale is a vital part of our arts and culture ecology, enabling exciting theatre and dance productions to reach more people. Listening to the industry, we’ve heard just how tough touring is right now, so we’ve worked together to create the Arts Council’s first repayable grant scheme. The scheme will incentivise productions to tour at scale, shoulder some of the risk that touring entails, and deliver more great work to more people, in more places.’

ACE has developed the Incentivising Touring scheme in collaboration with an external working group and following consultation with more than 65 organisations. It will operate alongside ACE’s current touring strand of National Lottery Project Grants, which has invested in 257 projects since November 2021.