Since its inception in 1997, Tête à Tête has supported over 500 world premieres of new works all over the UK. Can we help you with your operatic dreams?

If you want to participate in the Festival, in whatever capacity, please use the contact form below.

If you want to bring your own production to the Festival please send us your idea via this link and we will be in touch, and soon. It might just be an initial thought for a work, you might have already developed it, you may have never produced a work, you might have produced many. If in doubt just send it and we can start chatting about how to give it wings.

When programming the Festival, we’re looking for artists with a burning passion to see their dreams come true. We also want to make sure that we’re able to help the artists in our Festival beyond just giving them a venue. We’re not looking for perfectly-polished shows that could go on anywhere, but artists who want help in developing their practice creatively, or learning new skills in producing, marketing, and other parts of the process.

What happens?

The first step involves a conversation with one of the Tête à Tête team, giving you access to their wealth of experience. Your conversation might involve  advice about the sector, recommendations of possible collaborators and sources of inspiration, or of people who could support or help develop your work.

We try and make sure that every artist pitching a show for the Festival gets something useful out of the experience. It can also help us identify where an artist might need extra care and support in bringing their show to life. We do everything we can to support Festival artists, especially those from unconventional routes into opera.

Timeline

There are more applicants for the Festival each year, and only some of the artists we speak to go on to produce work in a Festival. This may be a Festival within three to six months of the initial conversation, but it often ends up being a Festival one, two, or even three to four years later. It all depends on what is best for a particular artist.

These conversations really pick up in the autumn preceding each Festival, and run through into the spring. Try as we might to do it earlier, the programme almost always ends up being finalised towards the end of April.

For all shows in the festival or even beyond, there is a wealth of advice to help you make it happen on our website. You can read more about the process for artists in our How, What, Where, When guide here, and find other guidance we give artists here.

Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival usually takes place between August and September each year. Over the years, we have produced operas with themes as broad as war, gaming culture, love, serial killers, spinning and knitting, the Soviet Union, friendship, the circus, the Egyptian empire, bees, aliens, necrophiliac gay ducks… so share your ideas with us today!