The touring spring performance festival, which alternates dance and theatre programmes across mid-sized American cities, has reached its third year with a programme that demonstrates what the touring form can do when the curatorial commitment matches the production investment.

The structure

The festival's structure pairs two dance companies and two theatre companies across each touring stop, with a defined number of performances at each venue. The structure produces the kind of artistic exposure that mid-sized cities historically struggle to support on their own.

The audiences

The audiences in the touring cities have, on the festival's published attendance data, been growing year-on-year. The growth reflects the festival's careful work in building local presenting partnerships rather than the kind of one-off touring that the form has historically defaulted to.

The work

The work in this year's festival is uniformly strong. The two dance companies are both producing repertory at the level the form aspires to; the two theatre companies bring different but complementary aesthetics to the touring frame.

What this represents

What the festival represents, more broadly, is the kind of cultural infrastructure that mid-sized cities deserve and that the broader cultural funding landscape has been slow to support. Operations like this one accumulate slowly and matter durably.