“Transform is an international festival grown from the grassroots”– The Stage
OUR MISSION
Transform is the UK’s leading festival for inclusive, international performance. The festival nurtures, creates and presents extraordinary, cross disciplinary performance with the power to change the way we see the world. Drawing on the rich cultural diversity of the Leeds City Region, Transform is a global meeting point, where performance drives urgent social agendas and imagines new futures.
OUR VISION
Our vision is for a future where bold and brave performance is a catalyst for social change, where the Leeds City Region is celebrated as a global hub for innovative collaboration and where a new generation of change-making artists and arts professionals are supported to reimagine the world around us.
Transform is
AMBITIOUS
We create and present outstanding work, the quality and scale of which is fundamental to increasing audience trust, engagement and enjoyment, to driving a sense of local pride and possibility and to positioning ourselves and our city as national and international leaders.
BOLD
We deliver projects and programmes that have real impact on audiences, communities and the wider art sector, that explore new creative territories and confront challenging issues and experiences with ambition and confidence.
ROOTED
Connecting the local and the global, our work, the way we make it and the people we make it with reflect the places and communities around us and the social issues that we face together.
ETHICAL
All of our activities, our working methods, governance and communications reflect our responsibility to the wellbeing of those we work with, our wider society and our planet.
What we do
FESTIVALS
We produce a bold, brave, vivid and socially-conscious international festival of performance, taking place in major venues, iconic and unusual locations across Leeds. Transform festival brings together powerful new performances and special events by artists from across the North of England and the globe and is experienced by over 12,000 people.
SUPPORT
We support the next wave of bold performance makers in the North, providing commissioning support, development opportunities and ways to connect their international counterparts. We facilitate a collective of Young Curators aged (18-25) who gain an insight into what it takes to realise major festivals and interdisciplinary performance, and are given responsibility for conceiving and realising aspects of our festivals.
CREATION
Transform commissions and produces extraordinary productions that are seen in Leeds and beyond. Our commissions have gone on to tour venues and festivals across Europe, Australia and North America. We have a particular specialism for working with artists to develop remarkable projects that involve local communities and local people in their creation and realisation.
LEADERSHIP
We are committed to ensuring that audiences in Leeds and the wider North have access to extraordinary international performance, and that UK artists are supported and amplified to create bold work that is relevant to today’s world. We engage in a variety of networks and partnerships to support these aims with like-minded venues and festivals across the UK and internationally.