11:00-17:00, Saturday 27th September 2025
The Cockpit
FREE, including a 50% discount on tickets to English Touring Opera’s Elixir of Love 27th September
For Sunday 28th September click here.
You are warmly invited to come and rediscover the joy you first found in opera at two days of playful activities designed to rekindle your spark.
The Joy of Opera is a chance for anybody who has experienced the visceral magic of the art form, whether creator, performer, backstage, front of house, admin or audience, to join with like minds in a magical, non-hierarchical, safe space. Here, through practical sessions (or ‘stalls’) rather than debate, we can share our enthusiasm, skills and knowledge in a playful yet positive and constructive manner, getting to know each other along the way.
If you’re there at the right moment, you might even be offered Battenberg by Tête à Tête’s Patron and Master of the King’s Music Errollyn Wallen CBE.
When you arrive, you will be given a certain number of magic beans. Over the next two days, you may spend them or earn more depending which stalls you chose.
Here’s what’s happening on Saturday:
Opera Escape Room:Tim Burke following the terrifying success of the TàT Opera Escape Room in Newcastle, this is a chance to find out if you too can get out in one piece – but only if you co-create a new opera!
Saturday 11:15 + 🫘 🫘 🫘
Instant Opera is Everything:Anthony Ingle the genius behind Impropera, will inspire you with the confidence to jump off the precipice into improvising your own opera
Saturday and Sunday 14:30 + 🫘 🫘 🫘
Sebastian: Bahaa al Ansary an AI learning to perform through text and piano notes — you help shape his first steps on stage. 30–40 min of improvisation and audience play
Saturday and Sunday 14:30.+ 🫘 🫘
Paint Your Opera:Helen Epega Helen (The Venus Bushfires) invites you to explore opera as both word and colour. Through live reading of fragments of her libretto ‘Of Earth and Quill’ and her synaesthetic practice of painting music, audiences are guided to create their own visual responses to text and sound.
Saturday 14:30 +🫘 🫘 🫘 🫘
COMMIT:Irum Fazal bring your ideas for opera concerned with current or historical politics and we’ll talk about how to turn big ideas into powerful stories
Saturday and Sunday pm + 🫘
POTTERING: Irum Fazal come and share your stories of being in gardens: treehouses, mud pies, French cricket, easter eggs, greenhouses, autumn leaves, flower pots, blackberries and snails as research for a new garden opera.
Saturday and Sunday pm + 🫘
PR Drop-In Surgery: WildKat PR Nicola Kemp shares her top tips for getting your show noticed in the press
Foyer drop-in Saturday & Sunday am +🫘
Dreams and a Heart: Regina Mendes Your chance to meditate a tiny heart and some dreams into one of Regina’s growing community of dolls.
Foyer drop-in Saturday & Sunday + 🫘
Freelancing: Freelancers Make Theatre Work are here to support you and to give you a voice – Foyer drop-in Saturday & Sunday +🫘
Don’t worry too much about times, as you see in the photo above, we are here to help you with your choices!
You can read a programme for this event here.
If you would like to create your own stall please email info@tete-a-tete.org.uk.
Access
If you have any access needs please let us know in advance at info@tete-a-tete.org.uk and we’ll make sure it all works for you as well as it possibly can. Level access to the auditorium involves going outside, though the feedback we’ve always had is how lovely and helpful the Cockpit staff are at making this work; the auditorium is otherwise accessed via six steps. Other spaces are both upstairs and on the ground floor, we can reallocate spaces according to which you might like to attend if need be.
Infants, small children, and food and drink are not allowed in the studios, except water in unbreakable bottles.
Please visit the Cockpit’s website for full information about your visit.
Age range: Any age, but mostly adults
Produced by Tête à Tête
Venue: The Cockpit, Gateforth Street, London NW8 8EH.
Presenters TBA.