Our first Festival of Ideas explores the future of storytelling

Our first ever Festival of Ideas invites arts professionals to explore the future of storytelling and tackle the biggest questions facing the arts and culture sector today.

From Wednesday 16 to Friday 18 July 2025, we are opening our doors to artists, researchers, policy makers and performing arts practitioners from across the globe for the Festival of Ideas, a three-day festival that explores the future of storytelling.

The Festival of Ideas will bring together learnings from our first group of Interdisciplinary Fellows and the international institutions they have collaborated with, from Bristol to Brooklyn, USA.

During the festival, they will discuss and demonstrate how we might work together to build a healthier and more sustainable ecosystem for the creative industries, with their research exploring some of the biggest questions facing the creative and cultural sectors today.

Key themes of the festival this year include:

  • The role of the artist in an age of AI
  • The future of storytelling in an immersive landscape
  • The role of higher education in arts and culture
  • Places where ‘liveness’ happens - from site-specific to the metaverse
  • The future of theatre design - digital pre-visualisation in an age of VR
  • Financial modelling for the future - building a more sustainable creative ecosystem
  • Co-curating immersive exhibitions with audiences
  • Building the workforce of the future - the creative case for diversity
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Our 2024-25 group of Interdisciplinary Fellows will share their research findings at the three-day Festival of Ideas.
© Ellie Smith Browse and license our images
Sarah Ellis, RSC Director of Creative Innovation, says:

"As the only performing arts organisation with Independent Research Organisation status, the RSC is a sector leader in artist-led research.

"For our first Festival of Ideas we’ve collaborated with brilliant artists alongside organisations from Massachusetts, Oxford, Stanford USA, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Bristol. These international partnerships have encouraged risk-taking, experimentation, and supported diverse talent to make sure the cultural sector continues to evolve and thrive.

"Over the last year they have researched what storytelling and the future of the performing arts might look like for the artists who create the work, and the audiences who experience it.

"Through creative innovation we continue to explore new forms of storytelling across multiple platforms including pioneering work with immersive technologies including AI, virtual reality (VR), and gaming, as demonstrated by the trailblazing project Lili – the RSC’s first venture into the world of gaming."

Collaborators at this year’s festival include: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Open Documentary Labs and Co-Creation Studio (Cambridge, MA, USA), The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (Oxford), Stanford Arts (Stanford, CA, USA), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY, USA), Music Center (Los Angeles), and Watershed (Bristol).

After the festival, we will reveal our new Interdisciplinary Fellows and partner organisations, who will continue the Research and Development in our creative innovation work.

The Festival of Ideas is is generously supported by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Rothschild Foundation.

DISCOVER MORE ABOUT THE RSC INTERDISCIPLINARY FELLOWSHIPS

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