Check out FestLab – and see what’s on the slab

In the United States, we have incubators for artists and arts projects of all kinds, from dance and theater to popular music and digital design. Why not an incubator for festivals?

Europe has one. It’s called the FestLab for Creativity and Innovation.

Set up by the European Festivals Association as part of the European Commission’s European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009 - a multinational effort to encourage awareness of the personal, social and economic benefits of creativity and innovation and promote better education and training in related skills – FestLab aims to draw attention to the important role of festivals in creative social and cultural processes and help individual festivals fulfill their artistic missions.    

The European Year site currently features a conversation with Ruta Pruseviciene, executive director of the 13-year-old Vilnius Festival, which has resisted catering to popular tastes and trends and set its own artistic agenda. We all need to learn how to do that better, no matter what creative enterprise we’re developing.