A session asking about he shape and state of British theatre frequently harked back a decade or so - to a period where independent and experimental theatre practice felt incredibly fruitful. That momentum, that freedom and, crucially, that funding, feels like it has seized up or dwindled.

People reported a lack of risk, and a lack of space or spaces where risk-taking becomes possible. A company like Coney couldn't emerge today, one of its founders said. There wouldn't be the room for its processes to unfurl and discover new directions. The culture - particularly the work-in-progress culture - has become more product-led. Witness the NT Studio's transformation into the NT's new work department.

In fact, such spaces where experimentation, uncertainty and FORMAL innovation are possible have consistently closed or grown restricted over the last decade. Platforms like the ICA or the Barbican's BITE seasons, spaces like the Shunt Vaults or BAC, schools like Dartington and Bretton Hall - all of which encouraged slippery, innovative explorative practices - have diminished and the result is more work in boxes, more predicability, fewer new artists/companies finding their own approach. Shortened processes, straightened funding, is accelerating this. The result is an increase in certainty and fixity and continuity.

Theatremakers/artists are slipping outside of theatre - to cabaret and queer scenes, to performance art, to participatory work - places that allow room to evade definition and expectation.

Have independent artists been squeezed out of the sector? Not just by straightened funding, but by having to collaborate with/appeal to/report to venues and by the proliferation of co-productions. As those shows play longer and travel wider, more unusual, idiosyncratic work is pushed out.

Game-changing international work is not as prominent: Nature Theatre of Oklahomas, Castelluccis, Elevator Repair Services, Dmitri Krymovs - this sort of artist is not making it to the UK in the same way they were. LIFT feels a lone wolf where once it didn't.

Questions about social utility and accessibility - has this overtaken the push towards artistic innovation and novelty?

"The word theatre can be a real turn off." Subverting conventions - making events for people - can be accessible in its own way. Watch this, respond to it, see what you get - or do you need a sophisticated 'theatre' vocabulary? Is experimental theatre by its nature elitist? Or is it accessible just by doing its own thing and arriving as a provocation?

Has the proliferation of festival's around the UK put experimental work into a silo? It exists, but only for a two week window, then business as usual. Does this become more insular - the same audiences at the same type of work?

What's exciting at the moment? No-one really had an answer. That feels fairly problematic.