Somewhere along the way, "co-production" became a word we reach for to make a project sound more ambitious than it is. It appears in the third paragraph of the press release, next to the funders' logos, signalling reach and prestige. And yet, in my experience, co-production is the least decorative thing in a touring project. It is load-bearing. When a cross-border tour succeeds or quietly falls apart, the decisive factors are almost never on stage — they are in the co-production architecture that was, or wasn't, built before the first rehearsal.
I want to make the case for treating co-production as what it actually is: the primary infrastructure of sustainable international touring, and one of the few instruments we have that is genuinely fit for the financial and ecological reality the sector now operates in.
Co-production versus presentation — a distinction worth defending
It's worth being precise, because the terms are used loosely. Presenting a work means hosting a finished production and, usually, buying it out. Co-producing means sharing the risk and the authorship of bringing a work into the world — money, yes, but also creative stake, rights, and responsibility for its life afterwards. The difference is not one of scale. It is one of position. A presenter receives a tour. A co-producer helps design one.
That design question is where the real value sits. When touring is built into a work from the co-production table onward — rather than bolted on once the premiere is over — the entire economy of the project changes. The circuit is not something you go looking for after the fact; it is baked into who is in the room from the beginning.
The smartest financial architecture we have
The instinctive reading of co-production is risk-sharing, and that is true: no single partner carries the full weight of a creation. But the more interesting mechanism is diversification of funding streams. Each co-producer does not merely bring a contribution — they unlock an entire national or regional ecosystem behind them. A French partner opens doors that a Czech or a Norwegian partner simply cannot, and vice versa. A well-composed co-production is, in financial terms, a portfolio: several uncorrelated funding sources, several calendars, several logics, assembled around one artistic core.
This is also why co-production is quietly one of the most resilient responses to a volatile funding landscape. When public budgets tighten in one country, a project anchored in three or four ecosystems is not left exposed to a single political cycle. Fragility is distributed. So is opportunity.
The machinery nobody puts in the press release
Here is the part that separates the idea of co-production from the practice of it. Supporting international mobility cannot stop at the artistic vision; it has to stand on solid ground in management and funding frameworks. And that ground is genuinely technical.
The friction is rarely artistic. It is administrative, logistical, legal, and — the part most often underestimated — fiscal:
- Contractual architecture. Who is the delegated producer? How are intellectual property and future exploitation rights divided? How are billing, credit, and revenue splits defined, and what happens to them when the work outlives the tour? A co-production agreement negotiated after the money is committed is a co-production agreement negotiated too late.
- Cash-flow asynchrony. National funds disburse on their own timelines. One partner is reimbursed a year after the fact; another needs its share up front. The project can be fully funded on paper and still insolvent in month three. Modelling liquidity — not just the budget total — is a core producing skill, not an afterthought.
- Cross-border taxation. The moment an artist is paid across a border, withholding tax, double-taxation treaties, and the special regime for artistic activity enter the room. Fees can be taxed at source in the country of performance and again at home; relief exists, but it has to be planned for, documented, and claimed. A co-production that ignores its own tax exposure is quietly leaking a meaningful percentage of its budget.
- Social security and posted-worker rules. Touring artists moving across the EU need their coverage in order — the A1 machinery is unglamorous, but a missing certificate at a border or an audit is not a minor issue.
- Labour cost asymmetry. Minimum fees, collective agreements, and per diem norms differ sharply between partner countries. Fairness is not automatic; it has to be designed.
None of this is a reason to be discouraged. It is a reason to take the management craft of co-production as seriously as we take the dramaturgy. These are solvable problems — but they are solved by people who know they exist and price them in from the start.
Fairness is not a footnote — it is the structure
Co-productions bring together partners of very different means. A large festival with structural funding and a small independent company are not equals at the table, and pretending otherwise produces a particular failure mode I've seen too often: extractive collaboration, where a smaller partner supplies a name, a market, or a "diversity" credential while carrying disproportionate risk and receiving disproportionately little.
A fair co-production is deliberate about this. It means transparency about each partner's real budget and capacity, shared decision-making rather than delegated compliance, and honouring different starting points instead of demanding identical contributions. This is not charity — it is what makes the collaboration durable. Partnerships built on solidarity survive their first crisis. Partnerships built on convenience do not.
The ecological shift reinforces the same logic. As the sector moves away from high-frequency fly-touring toward fewer, longer stays, regional clustering, and hybrid or "showing without going" formats, co-production becomes the natural vehicle for it. Lower-carbon distribution is inherently more relational and more locally embedded — which is to say, it is more co-produced.
What I would tell a company preparing to co-produce
Four principles, learned the hard way:
Negotiate the agreement before the money, not after. Appoint a clear delegated producer so accountability is never ambiguous. Model your cash flow and your tax exposure before you sign anything — the total budget tells you almost nothing about whether the project is viable in real time. And build the tour into the creation from the first conversation, so that distribution is a design principle rather than a rescue operation.
Co-production, done well, is not the prestigious add-on it is often mistaken for. For the independent performing arts, it is closer to a condition of survival — the infrastructure that lets ambitious work cross borders without breaking the people and organisations who make it.