Aviva Studios

Aviva Studios is a venue built for work that can’t be created anywhere else. Home of Factory International (the team behind Manchester International Festival), it’s where premieres are the point – world firsts, UK debuts and new commissions that need unusual amounts of space, time and technical freedom to exist at all.

Designed by Rotterdam-based practice OMA, the building is engineered for flexibility. The Warehouse is a vast, hangar-like space capable of holding monumental exhibitions (more on that in a moment) and large-scale performance (ditto). The Hall is a 1,600-seat theatre that can pivot between dance, theatre, opera, live music and multidisciplinary work. Both have moveable walls and stages that allow scale to shift dramatically, inviting artists to actively respond to the architecture rather than work around it.

That physical flexibility underpins the programme’s broader logic. Across visual art, music, theatre and dance, Aviva Studios tends to champion boundary-pushing form, big ideas and work that creates total environments rather than discrete “shows”. Manchester is often central to that thinking – sometimes as subject, sometimes as testing ground – with projects that engage directly with histories of labour, power, protest and collective experience, while also generating work that will travel nationally and internationally.

Spring/Summer 2026 – a season of premieres – is a useful snapshot of how this approach plays out in practice. A major new exhibition by Ai Weiwei brings two centuries of Chinese and British relations into focus, using Manchester – the beating heart of the Industrial Revolution – as both subject and setting. A UK premiere of Du Yun’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Angel’s Bone lands in the Hall as part of the English National Opera’s developing partnership with Greater Manchester.

Elsewhere, a world-premiere dance work inspired by Sinéad O’Connor centres voice, defiance and protest, while Return to the Forest blends dance and puppetry into an immersive, family-focused experience. Alongside these premieres, headline gigs, cutting-edge classical and experimental music coexist – all held together by the building’s ability to transform and by a consistent appetite for artistic risk, no matter the form.

Beyond the headline programme, Factory International’s wider work lives in and around the building. Through Factory Academy, local residents can access free training and routes into creative careers – from technical roles to producing and marketing – alongside industry-facing programmes and artist development initiatives that support early and mid-career practitioners with space, mentoring and practical resources. The idea is to help build the workforce and conditions that make ambitious work possible in the first place.

For audiences who want to engage more deeply, Factory International Membership offers a way into the venue’s ongoing story. Members receive priority booking, discounts across Aviva Studios, exclusive digital content and behind-the-scenes access – but more importantly, membership directly supports the commissioning of new work, artist development and creative engagement programmes. It’s framed not as a perk-driven upsell, but as a way of sustaining the kind of cultural risk-taking the venue exists to enable.

Whether you’re arriving for a monumental exhibition in the Warehouse or a one-off performance in the Hall, the underlying promise is consistent – this is a venue designed to let artists do things they couldn’t do anywhere else.