Thu 02 May

Start time: 18:00

T3 Festival
Theatre is Dead - Long Live Theatre!

Author: Peter Oswald
Director: Howard Gayton
Location: RS1 Roborough Studios, Prince of Wales Road, Postcode: EX4 4SB Show on Map

Andromedas and Thorax, the Spirits of Tragedy and Comedy, look down from the spirit realm, perplexed: Actors no longer come to them for inspiration. Theatre is in fact, dead! In a desperate attempt to kick theatre's corpse back to life, the Spirits incarnate in the physical realm to re-ignite the ancient ceremonies and awaken the magic of theatre's earliest beginnings.
The World Premier of Columbina Theatre’s new dark comedy, written by Peter Oswald (Globe, NT, Bristol Old Vic, Marylebone)
"The Language was incantatory, the story beautiful – I was spellbound and inspired throughout.” audience reaction to Columbina’s 4.5 star show – Egil.

Fri 03 May

Start times are 14:00 and 18:00

T3 Festival
Theatre is Dead - Long Live Theatre!

Director: Howard Gayton
Location: RS1 Roborough Studios, Prince of Wales Road, Postcode: EX4 4SB Show on Map

Wed 08 May

Start time: 15:00

Employability Salon #1 - Elaine Faulkner and Fin Irwin

Location: TS1 Alexander Building, Thornlea, New North Road, Postcode: EX4 4LA Show on Map

‘So you want to work in theatre?’ with Elaine Faulkner: Elaine is a locally-based, freelance Production Manager who has many years’ experience working in the theatre industry, touring locally and nationally to a wide range of venues including primary schools, studio spaces and large scale theatres. She has also been Head of Technical at the Northcott Theatre and production managed the Exeter Women of the World festival. Elaine will be sharing her experiences of working in the theatre industry with a particular focus on how to look after your wellbeing, the unions you can join and where to start with managing your finances.
Elaine is a locally-based, freelance Production Manager who has many years’ experience working in the theatre industry, touring locally and nationally to a wide range of venues including primary schools, studio spaces and large scale theatres. She has also been Head of Technical at the Northcott Theatre and production managed the Exeter Women of the World festival. Elaine will be sharing her experiences of working in the theatre industry with a particular focus on how to look after your wellbeing, the unions you can join and where to start with managing your finances.

‘On yer Bike(shed)’ with Finn Irwin: Finn is artistic director of Bodmin Courthouse, IntoBodmin – formerly director of The Bikeshed and student at University of Exeter Drama department. Find out how he has managed to make his way in local theatrical management and creativity.

Wed 08 May

Start time: 16:30

Research Seminar: What is there left for art to do?

Presented by: T. Sasitharan (Sasi)
Location: TS2 Alexander Building, Thornlea, New North Road, Postcode: EX4 4LA Show on Map

There is nothing new under passing the sun. If there is a truth universally acknowledged in art and theatre it is that originality, genuine novelty and creativity, “newness”, although possible, is very difficult to achieve. The grandest of visions, the boldest of ideas, the most radical points-of-view, have all been stated and tried and done before. Today, when we know so much more than has ever been known, when the smart phones in our pockets and handbags can access all the knowledge we have ever known, what is there left for art to do? What is the responsibility of the artist, the art teacher, in the age of super computers, Artificial Intelligence and climate catastrophe? This talk posits that one responsibility is to look back at past art practice, recover traditions, the tried and tested ways of making art, and repurposing these for the here and now. So that we too can rekindle the hope of originality, of novelty and of the radically “new” in art. So that in this unprecedented, globalized moment of hyper-capitalism, corrosive conservatism and cultural antipathy, art can answer the old woman who asked Anna Akhmatova: “Could one ever describe this?” Art has a hope of “describing this” only if it questions the status quo, challenges social structures, respects diversity, embraces difference, includes the marginalized and regains the power to transform the viewer. The single most powerful potential of art to do this resides in the artist’s capacity to “look back” with the full force of imagination.

About Sasitharan: T. Sasitharan (Sasi), co-Founder and director of ITI was Artistic Director of Substation (1995-2000), Singapore’s only independent arts centre, and was Theatre and Visual Arts critic of The Straits Times (1988-1995). From 1983 to ‘88, he taught Philosophy at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Sasi is author of articles ranging from commentaries and essays to reviews of performances and exhibitions, and international catalogue texts. He speaks at conferences on arts, education and creativity. Over 45 years he’s been a theatre practitioner - actor, performer, director, producer, and teacher. He received the Cultural Medallion, Singapore’s highest arts award, in 2012, the Third Harvard Fellow, Harvard Club of Singapore in Mar 2022, and the NUS’ Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Distinguished Arts and Social Sciences Alumni Award in May 2022.

The Intercultural Theatre Institute (ITI), in Singapore, trains exceptional theatre artists. Formerly called the Theatre Training & Research Programme (TTRP), ITI was founded by Cultural Medallion recipients Kuo Pao Kun (1939 – 2002) and T. Sasitharan. The practice-centred training “immerses” students in four traditional Asian theatre forms (Noh, Beijing Opera, Kutiyattam and Wayang Wong), juxtaposed with contemporary actor training. The three-year, full-time programme with a distinctive intercultural methodology, teaches skills in performance and theatre-making and offers actors diverse resources to work across cultural, linguistic, social and national boundaries. ITI - the post-colonial theatre school par excellence.

Wed 08 May

Start time: 17:00

Exeter Screen Studies Research Centre Talk: Dr Alix Beeston "Kathleen Collins… Posthumously"

Location: TS3 Alexander Building, Thornlea, New North Road, Postcode: EX4 4LA Show on Map

"One never talks out loud without wishing for an audience,” or so says a character in one of Kathleen Collins’s plays. Yet to be Collins’s audience today—to examine the textual materials that survived her death from cancer in 1988—is to occupy an uncomfortable position in relation to women’s and African American literary and film history.

During her lifetime, Collins was known primarily as a playwright, but she was also the author of numerous short stories, at least one unfinished novel, and eight original screenplays. One of these screenplays became the dramatic feature Losing Ground, directed by Collins in 1982. However, the film was scarcely shown at its release, and it only became widely known in 2015, when it was remastered and distributed to acclaim on the festival circuit. In 2016, 16 of Collins’s stories were published in the volume Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?; and, in 2019, another selection from her archive appeared as Notes From A Black Woman’s Diary.

In this talk, Alix Beeston argues that the pathos of Collins’s untimely death modulates her newly disseminated work, and that this produces ethical challenges for her posthumous audience. Even as Collins’s posthumous recovery unveils the conditions of racism and sexism that limited Black women’s contributions to film production in the late twentieth century, her wider project of representation sits in tension with the imperatives of recovery work by readers, viewers, and scholars in the twenty-first century. Whereas Collins seeks actively to demythologise the experiences of Black women, we are bound precisely to mythologise Collins in her absence.

Beeston draws on research at Collins’s recently accessioned archive at the New York Public Library’s Schomberg Center and on interviews with Collins’s collaborators, friends, and family members in sketching out alternative and more pragmatic means by which we might approach her work, particularly her unproduced screenplays. Far from deficiency or lack—the associations that cling to the screenplay as a form, as well as to Collins’s career in the wake of her death—the abiding sense of her archive is the vitality and fruitfulness of a lifelong practice of iterative creative labour performed with and alongside others.

Bio: Alix Beeston is Reader in English at Cardiff University. She is the author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (Oxford University Press, 2018, paperback 2023) and the co-editor, with Stefan Solomon, of the award-winning volume Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (University of California Press, 2023). With Pardis Dabashi, she coedits the Visualities forum at Modernism/modernity Print Plus. Alix is at work on two new books: a critical–creative account of women in photography, tentatively titled Image Encounters: Photography and the Feminist Art of Being Seen, and Women, Sisters, and Friends: The Selected Plays and Screenplays of Kathleen Collins, a volume she is co-editing with Hayley O'Malley and Samantha N. Sheppard.

Mon 13 May

Start time: 10:00

Improvisation on Screen for actors, directors and camera operators - Masterclass with Don Boyd (3 Days)

Presented by: Don Boyd & Bryan Brown
Location: TS3 Alexander Building, Thornlea, New North Road, Postcode: EX4 4LA Show on Map

In this masterclass, students will be introduced to various techniques for developing a theme or set of dramatic circumstances into a concrete scene on screen through improvisation. Director and producer Don Boyd and Acting for Screen convenor Bryan Brown will work with a handful of actors, directors and camera operators to explore the ways in which a scene comes alive on screen from an improvisational theme.

Small groups will be assigned beforehand in order to begin to develop a theme or set of dramatic circumstances you want to pursue. The first day of the masterclass will be a talk by Don Boyd about improvisation for screen and ways to approach your work. Each group will then present their theme and ideas for how to concretise their scene and Don will offer guidance about how to go about filming the scene. The following day, each group will film on their own, with assistance from Brown when needed.

Additionally, camera operators will be trained by the CDF tech team where necessary and each group will edit their own scene (with guidance from the CDF tech team) for a final showing on Wednesday where there will be a guided feedback session and discussion of the work. There will also be a final Q&A at this time with Don Boyd.

This workshop will have limited places. To register as an actor, director or camera operator, please send a 250-word maximum personal statement to Bryan Brown B.Brown@exeter.ac.uk explaining why participating in the workshop is important for you at this time. Please include which degree and year you are in your email, and if you have a particular theme or type of scene you want to improvise (you don’t need to, but it will help us group you if you do). Our intention is to choose a range of experience and needs for this workshop. Previous experience is not required; passion and commitment are.

Applications due by 3 May.

Wed 15 May

Start time: 15:00

Employability Salon #2

Location: TS1 Alexander Building, Thornlea, New North Road, Postcode: EX4 4LA Show on Map

Speed-dates with directors/entrepreneurs (Nikki Sved, Wendy Hubbard, Anna Kiernan, Tony Lidington)

Fri 17 May

Start time: 17:00

T3 Festival
After you

Author: Viola Cheng
Co-Directors: Supervisor: Schaefer,Kerrie; Hillman,Rebecca. Project initiator: Viola Cheng
Location: RS3 Roborough Studios, Prince of Wales Road, Postcode: EX4 4SB Show on Map

Will it be "you" after "you"?

This performance is part of my PhD research on applied theatre for university students on the prevention of intimate partner violence, and it will serve as the first practice of my research.
The aim of the performance is an auto-biographical solo performance exploration of the damage that second-hand IPV has on a child and the struggle to form healthy relationships in later life. Transform the IPV experience through concrete performance to form healthier relationships. The solo performance is characterized by a fusion of auto-ethnography and storytelling techniques. The performer presents a profoundly intimate account, incorporating personal anecdotes derived from either their own encounters or those of others. The tale delves into the trajectory of an individual who has experienced intimate partner violence (IPV),shedding light on the intricate range of emotions involved, the recurring pattern of abusive behavior, and the obstacles encountered when attempting to escape from an abusive partnership.This fusion of autobiography and solo performance allows the performer to stand as both a creative practitioner and a researcher, exploring their own identity and sharing their story through dance or other artistic mediums.

Mon 20 May

Start time: 16:30

Research Seminar: Poetic streams, singing, and selfhood: on liminality, creative practice, and power in sean-nós song and oral poetic performance

Location: TS2 Alexander Building, Thornlea, New North Road, Postcode: EX4 4LA Show on Map

Professor Tríona Ní Shíocháin and Dr. Séamus Barra Ó Súilleabháin (aka Súil Amháin)

Wed 22 May

Start time: 15:00

Employability Event #3: Commercial Theatre

Location: TS1 Alexander Building, Thornlea, New North Road, Postcode: EX4 4LA Show on Map

Meet Martin Berry (the new artistic director at the Northcott) & Roisin McCay-Hines (recent graduate and theatre director)

Wed 29 May

Start time: 10:00

Commedia dell'Arte Taster

Location: TS1 Alexander Building, Thornlea, New North Road, Postcode: EX4 4LA Show on Map

Commedia is the original actor’s theatre: It’s physical, it’s madcap, it’s a social commentary, and it is freakin’ awesome!.

This one-day workshop (10am - 5pm) will cover:

How to perform with a mask: a very freeing experience for performers!
The myriad characters: Servants, Lovers, Captains, and the Masters/Mistresses.
The use of Space.
Development of Narrative.

Led by Howard Gayton (Ophaboom Theatre, East 15 - London, ESMAE – Portugal, Goldsmith’s – London) the workshop is FREE, and open to all students in the Communication Drama and Film department.

Spaces limited to 20 people. Come dressed in comfortable studio clothes.

Wed 29 May

Start times are 16:00 and 18:00

T3 Festival
King Leir and His Three Daughters

Director: Mioara Tarzioru
Location: RS2 Roborough Studios, Prince of Wales Road, Postcode: EX4 4SB Show on Map

‘King Leir and his Three Daughters’ is a dramatic narrative that retells a famous story with roots in fairy tales from around the world, which has been explored using Michael Chekhov’s approach (including his Psychological Gesture) and eurythmy, a discipline that Chekhov deemed essential for his approach to actor training.