11:00-19:30, Sunday 28th September 2025
The Cockpit
FREE, including a 50% discount on tickets to English Touring Opera’s Elixir of Love 27th September
For Saturday 27th September, click here.
You are warmly invited to come and share, or indeed rediscover, the joy you find 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 Sunday:
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. 🫘 🫘
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 🫘
Everybody’s Queer: Guy Harries unleash your queerness. Create text, sound, movement, characters, and maybe a new opera? All welcome, everybody’s queer!
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 🫘
Take Over The Opera Sector: Leo Doulton A fantastical simulation of the opera industry led by our pioneer of immersive opera. Play as the Imperial Opera House, Ratfaced Opera, The Painbury Foundation, and more, experiencing, practicing, and experimenting with what it’s like to be making the decisions.
Sunday 11:15 🫘 🫘 🫘 🫘 🫘 🫘
All Articles Abandoned: Tania Holland Williams Posit: Opera is a form that invites and democratises drag, gives authority to gender options, and which allows for layered identity.
Sunday 11:15 🫘 🫘 🫘 🫘 🫘 🫘
Opera Therapy: Claire Shovelton, possibly others… – 1 on 1 Sessions for you to share memories of the moment the opera spark was ignited in you.
Sunday 12:30 + 🫘
Look your best in photos: Claire Shovelton Tête à Tête’s photos appear in the press and all over the socials, and we also make them available for your personal promotional use free of charge. In this session our production photographer Claire runs through tips on how to make the most of the production photographer being there!
Sunday 14:30 + 🫘🫘
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 MendesYour 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 +🫘
Also Come On Saturday For…
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 + 🫘 🫘 🫘
Engender: A network for women and non-binary people, addressing gender imbalance and representation in opera and music theatre, working with leaders, opera makers, creatives, performers and changemakers
Drop-in Saturday + 🫘
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 +🫘 🫘 🫘 🫘
Come to Belarus!: the company of SKARБ invite you to discover their birthplace through music and song.
16:00 Saturday +🫘 🫘 🫘 🫘
Turning Fantasies Into Realities: Leo Doulton offers one-to-one chats about how to turn “wouldn’t it be cool if?” into practical steps towards a show. Workshopping, fundraising, Interludes Of Existential Despair… and more!
Foyer drop-in Saturday am +🫘
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 emailinfo@tete-a-tete.org.uk.
Age range: Any age, but mostly adults
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.
Produced by Tête à Tête
Venue: The Cockpit, Gateforth Street, London NW8 8EH.
Presenters TBA.