Live Arts Lab is a series of workshops designed to inspire new initiatives that encourage fairness and equity across the global cultural ecosystem. They are intensive, collaborative, and interdisciplinary. They bring together policy makers, industry leaders, academics, and sector professionals to envision law, policy, industry best practices, and consumer initiatives that will build a fairer global cultural sector. They are designed to encourage fellows to forge new connections in a space creating candid communication, collaboration, allyship, and actionable results. Each Live Arts Lab is organized in cooperation with a major international cultural convening. Each focuses on a specific field and frames a discussion that is relevant to the invitees. Each edition builds on the work done at prior labs—synthesizing knowledge, ideas, and plans across disparate disciplines and across the global cultural sector. Over time, we will generate an evolving legal, policy, and business model—or collection of models—that will inform and inspire a fairer global cultural sector. And equally importantly, we hope to grow a network of Live Arts Lab “alumni”—a global community of professionals who share a common language and frame, and are united by the mission to create a fair cultural sector and a more equitable world.

Live Arts Lab creates a unique professional space that brings together culture industry leaders and culture policy makers to explore real, actionable ideas for promoting equity in the live arts. The lab has three goals: 

• Facilitate Relationships: We intentionally invite people who don’t all already know each other—yet! Fellows are, however, united by a shared interest in creating a more equitable cultural sector, and the belief that culture can lead to a better world. Fellows connect with people they don’t know, especially people who work in different facets of the sector.

• Build a common language: Depending on our language or what part of the sector we work in, we use different words and frames of reference to talk about fairness. Fellows actively learn about other peoples’ definitions and assumptions. This is crucial to promoting a common foundation of language and ideas across disparate areas of the sector.

• Propose Action: As much as policy, government, nonprofit, and business people interact with one another, they don't often have a chance to collaborate. Fellows work together. They share their aspirations, and speak candidly about what stands in their way.

The ideas generated at each Live Arts Lab will be summarized and integrated into a public-facing “plan”. This “plan” will initially be more of a “vision,” but each lab will inform and guide the structure of the next lab, so our aim is for successive labs to contribute to the vision’s evolving specificity and practicality. Ultimately, we hope that Live Arts Lab will provide the global cultural sector with a map it can use to make the Fair Culture Charter’s ideas practicable— through policy innovations, best practices, and consumer initiatives. 

Live Arts Lab was created by Matthew Covey (Tamizdat) and Marie Fol. It builds on the the work they did in collaboration with the cultural mobility information network On the Move, to create the Cultural and Artist Mobility Advocacy Summit (CAMAS) which was hosted by WOMEX in October 2023. CAMAS brought together 45 policy and industry leaders for a rich discussion and debate. We thank Christine Semba, Luca Jacob, Tove Waldemarsson, Jordi Baltà, and especially Marie Le Sourd for their support and expertise in making that project a reality. Read more about CAMAS here.