About Audience Labs

Audience Labs is the hub for

projects by Annette Mees and friends.

The Lab works with others - artists, theatre makers, scientists, technologists, policy makers and other interdisciplinary collaborators -to make work that imagines sustainable, just and creative visions of the future.

Our current institutions and structures - political, social and cultural - are unsustainable, often actively inflicting damage on the world and its inhabitants. Traditional cultural structures are decomposing in front of us. Many of us feel lost. The problems seem too big, too insurmountable, too complex to engage with. No matter how much information we consume - the answers of who and how we need to be in this age elude us. Sometimes mere survival of humanity in the next 100 years seems impossible. 

So how do we even start to imagine how we thrive? How do we start to imagine what we and our descendants might collectively celebrate? How do we imagine future joy?

Theatre and performance has always been a laboratory for experimentation, imagination and change. Audience Labs makes new forms of culture and stories of imagined worlds for our future descendants. What worlds do we conjure and what futures can we imagine into being

The work Audience Labs creates often defies definitions. We create projects telling those stories using all the art and craft humans have built up over millennia and combine those with the scientific insights and technologies we have now.

Audience Labs started at the Royal Opera House but now works for and with different artists, theatres and other organisations at the intersection of culture, innovation and social change.

About Annette Mees

Annette Mees is an award-winning theatre director, artist and dramaturg known for her innovative, experiential work that allows audiences to immerse themselves in new possibilities and big ideas. She works with interdisciplinary teams to create artistic work that defies definitions, undertake interdisciplinary R&D and spark new thinking. 

She is the chair of FutureEverything, a co-host of global conversation on The Future of Culture supported by Arup and Therme. She works as an innovation strategist, artistic advisor and dramaturg for a range of organisations and projects at the intersection of performance and innovation.

Previously she was a Creative Fellow for WIRED and The Space, Guest-Artistic Director of the Danish Inspiration Lab. She started her career as one of the co-Artistic Directors of Coney - an internationally renowned immersive theatre company. She was awarded the “Theatre Encouragement Award” by the Writers Guild of Great Britain for her collaborative approach to working with writers

Some of the organisations we have worked with:

AHRC, Arup, Battersea Arts Centre, British Council, DEN, European Space Agency, Figment, Goldsmith’s University, Google Creative Lab, GUAP, Imperial War Museum, NESTA, Kensington Palace, King’s College, National Gallery, National Theatre of Wales, National Ballet of Canada, NITE, Royal Holloway, Royal Opera House, Science Museum, SIRT, SJ01 San Jose Biennale, Substrakt, Tate Britain, The Southbank Centre, Therme, UK Parliament, Wayne McGregor, WIRED