Brighton Festival

In May, Brighton does not need to build a festival city from scratch. It already has narrow streets falling toward the sea, theatres embedded in the centre, churches, galleries, parks, Victorian buildings, distinct neighbourhoods and a seafront capable of hosting a temporary artwork that disappears weeks later without leaving much more than memory. Brighton Festival has spent almost six decades working with that condition. Rather than constructing a separate world behind perimeter fencing, it uses the actual city as its venue. One night might mean an orchestra inside Brighton Dome; the following afternoon could involve dance in an unexpected site, a monumental work on Hove Promenade or thousands of schoolchildren carrying sculpture, banners and percussion through streets that normally belong to traffic and shoppers.

The modern festival opened in April 1967 under Artistic Director Ian Hunter, and even the first programme resisted an easy label. Pink Floyd and The Who appeared alongside Yehudi Menuhin; Laurence Olivier brought National Theatre productions with a company that included a young Anthony Hopkins; classical performance occupied the same cultural moment as rock, theatre and experimental visual work. The point was not simply to pile disciplines on top of one another. Brighton was looking for a way to connect the city with artistic forms changing rapidly around it without establishing an overly comfortable border between “high” culture and popular culture. More than half a century later, that inaugural bill still feels unexpectedly close to the festival's present identity: what a work does to an audience matters more than the shelf on which it is supposed to sit.

Brighton Dome naturally became the principal anchor. The Concert Hall, Corn Exchange and Studio Theatre can hold music, dance, theatre, talks and work that sits somewhere between them, but the festival has never allowed those rooms to define its perimeter. Churches, galleries, industrial buildings, parks, community venues, residential neighbourhoods and the coastline enter the programme whenever an artist or commission requires them. That movement is one reason Brighton Festival can feel internationally ambitious without becoming detached from its location. Major artists arrive who could perform in any European cultural capital, yet the way audiences experience them remains shaped by Brighton: walking between venues, feeling Channel weather on the seafront, encountering public art on the way to another show or arriving in a neighbourhood where residents have helped determine what is being presented.

The Children's Parade may express that relationship more clearly than any headline booking. Since 1985, thousands of children, teachers, musicians and families have opened the festival by moving through Brighton with structures and performances prepared over months in schools and workshops. It is not an ornamental family event placed beside the “serious” programme; it has become one of Brighton Festival's defining public images. Its fortieth edition in 2026 once again turned the centre into a moving piece of collective art before much of the ticketed programme had properly begun. Initiatives such as Our Place extend the same principle into communities that have not always felt close to major cultural institutions. The underlying idea is significant: audiences should not always be required to travel toward culture. Sometimes the festival has to learn how to travel toward them.

Beginning in 2009, the Guest Director model provided another way of avoiding institutional routine. Anish Kapoor treated the city as a field for visual art; Brian Eno brought his long-standing interest in sound, technology and experimentation; Vanessa Redgrave, Michael Rosen, Hofesh Shechter, Ali Smith, Laurie Anderson, Kae Tempest, David Shrigley, Rokia Traoré, Lemn Sissay and others gave successive editions markedly different temperaments. These were not intended simply as celebrity curators choosing a few favourite acts. At their best, the Guest Directors altered how the whole programme was framed. Anoushka Shankar completed that era in 2025 with New Dawn. After sixteen years, Brighton decided that the next meaningful change was to end the mechanism itself and return overall artistic responsibility to its permanent programming team.

There had already been a more dramatic break in continuity. COVID-19 cancelled the 2020 festival, the first complete cancellation in 53 years. Digital events kept part of the organisation visible, but the absence also exposed how much Brighton Festival depends on physical movement through the city. It returned in 2021 with Lemn Sissay and a programme shaped around care, using reduced capacities, outdoor work and online formats while audiences slowly relearned what it meant to gather. The edition was not merely an imperfect substitute for a normal year. It became part of the wider recovery of Brighton's cultural ecology, putting artists, freelancers, venues and audiences back into contact after months in which the most basic premise of a city festival — people sharing spaces — had become uncertain.

The 2026 sixtieth edition used its anniversary to begin another chapter rather than simply look backwards. Lucy Davies led the programming team, and for the first time Brighton Festival originated a full production of its own: Kohlhaas, directed by Omar Elerian and starring Arinzé Kene. More than a hundred events surrounded that statement. Patti Smith returned for two contrasting nights; former Guest Director Laurie Anderson brought The Republic of Love; Sampa the Great joined Zamrock pioneers W.I.T.C.H.; Angélique Kidjo, Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Aldous Harding extended the contemporary music map; Asian Dub Foundation again transformed La Haine through live soundtrack performance; and the London Symphony Orchestra represented the classical tradition that has been embedded in the festival since its beginning. Across performances, free events, workshops and installations, engagement exceeded 160,000.

Brighton Festival remains a festival of a city rather than merely a festival located in one. That distinction is central to its survival. Artists change, curatorial systems eventually exhaust themselves, venues are restored, temporary structures appear and disappear and new communities ask different questions of an institution approaching sixty years of history. Brighton itself continues to supply the material. No public 2027 dates have yet been announced, but the direction after the 2026 anniversary is clearly forward rather than retrospective. Perhaps its most characteristic experience is still leaving Brighton Dome after seeing an internationally recognised artist and discovering that the next work is not through another door in the same complex. It is several streets away, perhaps beside the sea, and reaching it requires stepping back into Brighton itself.