ISPA: Global voices

Clare Beresford, Co-Artistic Director & Emily Davis, Senior Producer, Little Bulb Theatre, England

Little Bulb Theatre’s Clare Beresford and Emily Davis share what an award-winning company gains from stepping outside its own bubble at international events like ISPA

Little Bulb is an Olivier Award-winning theatre company based in the South West of England. For the past 18 years we have been making collaborative, devised theatre with music at its heart, ranging from mid-scale gypsy jazz operas to smaller scale work for young children and everything in between. Our collaboration with the Royal Ballet & Opera, Wolf Witch Giant Fairy, won the 2022 Olivier Award for Best Family Show, and our zany take on The Nutcracker, inspired by ’80s kids’ action films, received an Olivier nomination in 2025 after transferring to the West End last Christmas. This summer we’ll be taking Listen Dance, our participatory dance show with a nine-piece live band, to UK festivals including Latitude and Wilderness, then touring it to village halls in the autumn. We find joy in making work across multiple scales, spaces and contexts to connect with people through theatre and music.

It’s easy to feel siloed as a company that produces its own work, so it’s genuinely great to talk to colleagues facing different challenges and see how much we have to learn from each other. As guests at the 2026 ISPA Congress in Singapore, we experienced some world-class hospitality, but  what really stayed with us is a session at the Anthony Field Academy, where Louis Kwok Lit Yu talked about culture as a cycle: artistic product, memory and tradition, belief and value, everyday life. Culture isn’t just creating art products; it’s part of the scaffolding of people’s lives, which is why our most commercially successful shows are often seasonal. Our Christmas shows, spring tours and appearances at summer festivals sell because they slot into the structure of the year that audiences already live by.

Attending conferences like ISPA has been revelatory for us on many levels: seeing work from further afield and forming connections with artists and producers has inspired our own practice, while hearing from delegates who run festivals and organisations talk about their programmes, successes and challenges has been crucial for understanding where our work sits in a global context. Farooq Choudhury put it best in a speech he gave at ISPA Lugano 2025: attending these international congresses is the essential act of “walking the earth in search of beautiful coincidences.” You don’t know in advance which conversation, which colleague, which off-hand comment in a session will turn out to matter, you just have to keep showing up and staying open to it. 

To discover more about Little Bulb Theatre, visit littlebulbtheatre.com 

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Pamela Alderson, Head of Theatre, Británico Cultural, Peru, and a 2026 ISPA Global Fellow

Pamela Alderson, 2026 ISPA Global Fellow, offers insight into the collective operating model behind the FAE Lima Biennial and Peru’s increasingly international theatre scene 

I work at Británico Cultural, one of Lima’s most established cultural organisations. As Head of Theatre, my work spans programming, production and the kind of long-horizon thinking that asks: who are we making work for, and how do we bring them with us?

Part of that thinking is Británico’s commitment as a founding member of FAE Lima, a biennial performing arts festival now in its tenth year, run by seven organisations who collectively fund, programme and produce it. There is no single institution in charge, and decisions are made through shared committees. This model of collaboration has reshaped relationships across Lima’s performing arts sector, creating partnerships that now extend beyond the festival itself.

FAE Lima’s mission is to bring innovative international work to Lima, and to create international opportunities for Peruvian artists. Our programme, FAE Incuba, is a good example: it gives early-stage projects rehearsal space, mentorship, sessions with international artists, and the chance to present work-in-progress to programmers during the festival. The 2026 edition doubled its audience compared with the previous edition, while each year more productions presented at FAE go on to be invited to festivals abroad. As director of the festival for the next two years, my mission is to help ensure the festival’s long-term sustainability beyond the resources of its member organisations.

The same long-term thinking also informs my work at Británico. Proyectos de Creación, our artistic development and residency programme [CHECK?], commissions innovative work from Peruvian and international artists and invites audiences into the creative process at various stages. Building community around the making, not just the showing, is central to our vision. One current project, Mythos, will bring a British artist to Lima in October 2026 for an R&D residency with Peruvian artists. The residency will lead to its premiere in Spanish in Peru in May 2027, and a sister production in English in the UK later that year.

Peru is at an exciting moment in the international performing arts landscape, thanks to the rich interplay between tradition and contemporary culture. Peruvian theatre is beginning to travel, in part through the work of FAE Lima. There is also a broader mission: to nurture the human need for live connection that no screen can replace. This is a real challenge, but also an opportunity.

On the subject of connection, ISPA has given me the opportunity to see how organisations working in very different contexts are approaching many of the same challenges we face. Just as valuable has been the generosity with which people share what they’ve learned. That is the kind of solidarity, and the kind of knowledge, that goes a long way.

The next edition of FAE Lima will take place in March 2028. To discover more, visit faelima.com

Join ISPA at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the ISPA Series at the Fringe: Resilience in Action (19 August 2026), the New York Congress (12–14 January 2027), and at the mid-year congress in Uppsala, Sweden (8–11 June 2027).

For more information on ISPA’s congresses and upcoming programmes, visit www.ispa.org