Festival UK* 2022 - R&D Project

Festival UK* 2022 is a major nationwide celebration of creativity and innovation.

The Festival will take place across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales throughout 2022. It will deliver a programme of ground-breaking artistic commissions with the ambition of reaching millions; achieving the projects two objectives of bringing people together and promoting the UK's creativity to the world.

Festival 2022 Ltd, has been established to curate, manage and promote the Festival; working with Strategic Delivery Bodies within each nation to devise and deliver the programme.

2022 is a major year in the cultural life of the UK as we host the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, mark the 100th anniversary of the BBC, and celebrate HM The Queen's Platinum Jubilee.

The Festival has announced this R&D Project to identify Creative Teams from across Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics.

Teams must have a Lead Organisation and consist of 3-8 team members. This opportunity is to secure an R&D Commissioning Contract with a value of up to £100,000 for teams to imagine and design a potential artistic commission for the Festival.

Festival 2022 Ltd will contract with Lead Organisations on award, and those individual Lead Organisations will sub-contract with their team members.

The R&D Project (inclusive of the 30 R&D Commissioning Contracts) is stage one of a two-stage commissioning process; from which up to ten large-scale artistic projects for 2022 will be commissioned. The 30 R&D Project outputs will be assessed in February 2021 against defined criteria to identify the ten commissioning to take forwards to the stage two of commissioning under a Full Artistic Commissioning Agreement.

These ten commissions will be the Festival's artistic programme.

Four of the ten commissions will each be led by England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Each nation has a Strategic Delivery Body: (England - Festival 2022 Ltd, Scotland - VisitScotland / EventScotland, Wales - Creative Wales, Northern Ireland - TBC).

For these four commissions, Festival 2022 Ltd will be the contracting authority for the R&D Agreement (with the Strategic Delivery Body as a named party). The Strategic Delivery Body will then enter into the Full Artistic Commissioning Agreement with the Lead Organisation at stage two.

The remaining six commissions will be driven by Creative Teams from across the UK and will be the sole responsibility of Festival 2022 Ltd.

All ten commissions will be global in reach.

The value of the final ten commissions will be defined by the output of the R&D Project. The Festival's overall budget is £120million across the four nations.

The Festival will demonstrate the vital and inspirational role that creativity can play in our changing world. This investment comes at a time of particular need for sectors impacted by the global pandemic and will support the creation of work and jobs.

Visit festival2022.uk for further information.