Thank you to the funding support of the "Thematic Study Visit Scheme" from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, I have the opportunity to take on a few trips around Europe to visit some festivals and venues in between May 2016 to June 2018.

With my particular interests in cross-disciplinary arts, cross-artform to new format of presentation that across genre of performing art or visual art. So, I have specialised my focus to visit festivals and venues that I consider more innovative and experimental in their cross disciplinary programming approaches.

Kunstenfestivaldesarts is the first festival I visited in the trip, and it was also the one inspired me most among those festivals I have visited. The very vibrant spirit of the festival, with somewhat 20 venues spreaded out all around Brussels with international professionals, artists and visitors gathered here and there to exchange ideas and information in the three weeks of festivals. The festival emphasized on featuring new, small to medium scale productions, and at the same time very cross-disciplinary and experimental in spirit. Most of them are thought-provoking with one can see their intentions in pushing certain boundaries.

In the trips, apart from over 100 exciting productions and exhibitions that I have watched, I was also got quite inspired by the well developed co-production system in theatres in Europe. Under the EU, there seem to allow more cross-cultural collaborations among Europe cities. In terms of funding, artists' travel and touring of productions across cities very flexible, and mobile. The co-production system and network in Europe is very well established, it guarantees productions to develop touring plan well before the premiere, with co-production venue/festival partners at different cities, with shared production budget and burden between partners and the artists/companies. It allows artists/companies to have a more sustainable development in a long run.

In addition, in visiting different venues in Europe, I realised that there are lots of residency programme in Europe. Most of the residency programmes are indeed NOT production oriented, but generously in supporting artists for their own artistic research and development, and more process-oriented. From those residency programmes, I see the generosity mind with bigger vision for cross-cultural exchange.