Elevate Festival - WORK

WORK plays at the Barnfield Theatre on Sunday 1 November, part of this year's Elevate Festival. It's a piece of theatrical performance art that looks at the workforce as an entity — the things we say and do at work, and the parts of ourselves we leave behind to stay employed. It runs from staff room diet chat to the long-term suppression of our animal impulses, so it covers a fair bit of ground, from the mundane to the more visceral.

The sound is a big part of it: an original soundtrack of distorted field recordings and uncategorisable noise. It's not a play in the traditional sense, but something that sits between theatre and performance art, and the audio does a lot of the heavy lifting in setting the mood.

To get some context, Elevate Festival is Exeter Northcott's annual celebration of South-West artists, staged at the Barnfield Theatre and now returning for its third year. It grew out of the theatre's Elevate Artist Development Programme, which gives South-West artists rehearsal space and creative support to develop new performance work. The festival showcases what's come through that programme alongside new pieces by other regional artists. It runs alongside the Northcott's RAW platform for new writing, which commissions fresh work from local playwrights through Elevate Shorts, and feeds into a wider artist-development strand including the Scratch Night, where local theatre makers, comedians, dancers, musicians, actors and clowns are paired with audiences.

WORK is a work-in-progress, and there's an optional Q&A afterwards if you want to stick around and talk about it. The performance starts at 3.30pm on Sunday 1 November at the Barnfield Theatre, inside Exeter Northcott.