Welcome
Welcome to TAP OUT ’22, a festival of diverse, innovative and timely performance by the current crop of BA finalists from Goldsmiths' Department of Theatre and Performance.
This year is the culmination of a challenging journey for our third years. They have fought through stormy seas and forbidding skies, to emerge at the end of their degrees with a fierce brightness all their own. From their first year, when the Covid pandemic struck, these students have shown exceptional resourcefulness and resilience, finding inspiration and connection whatever the conditions. From lockdown to socially distanced production, through the disruption of industrial action, they have somehow found in the friction of our times the voltage of creativity that sparks before us now.
‘The light / for all time shall outspeed / the thunder crack’, wrote the poet William Carlos Williams. Admiring the work in this year’s festival we can witness the same velocity of illumination. However etched against the dark crises that attend our world, the performance of imagination also breaks forward, offering change. Such is this TAP OUT Festival’s vivid celebration of possibility.
For bringing this to pass I salute the staff teams on the final degree show courses. They have inspired, challenged, supported, questioned, guided and facilitated the students’ learning on these modules and this Festival event. In making it possible, they have been no less inspiring to watch.
Congratulations and Farewell
I could not be prouder of what our talented and dedicated students have accomplished. Each project in TAP OUT ‘22 is the result of a critically informed and research-led performance making process. Whether graduating in BA Drama and Theatre Arts, BA Drama: Performance, Politics and Society, BA Drama: Comedy and Satire, or BA Drama: Musical Theatre, each of our degrees presents this celebrated combination of ingenuity, awareness and integrity. It is with great pleasure that I congratulate each student and their contribution to making the Department a centre of cutting-edge performance work. This is a group of highly creative and critically engaged makers who have a wonderful adventure ahead of them. We bid them farewell in the knowledge that they will continue to dazzle our skies and light the beacons for us all to follow.
We hope you enjoy TAP OUT ‘22!
Dr Ben Levitas
Head of Department
Department of Theatre and Performance