In Conversation with Gilly Roche, Director of Making It Festival

Can you tell us a bit about the upcoming Making It Festival in a nutshell?

Making It Festival is a celebration of new, original work created by students from across Guildhall’s faculties of Production Arts, Drama and Music. It’s a chance to see world-premieres, works-in-progress and to get a glimpse at the next generation of artists and creators. Everything showcased in our eclectic Festival programme is brand new and invented by Guildhall students – from operas to short films and from performances to production art. This is our students in their own words and on their own terms.

How has it evolved from the first Making It Festival last year?

This year, we’ve streamlined the Festival programming remit to focus exclusively on celebrating new, original work created by Guildhall students. This shift allows us to connect and amplify work that has been happening at Guildhall for decades – to proudly declare our commitment to empowering students to make bold, inventive, provocative and thoughtful new work.

We’re also presenting a new series of discussion events called Making It Work, which invite students and alumni to talk about transferring this work into the industry.

Not everything is new though – last year’s hugely successful sell-out cabaret event SMORGASBORD is back, and we’re delighted that award-winning London cabaret legends Fag Packet (pictured) have agreed to host again.

How does Making It Festival tap into what it means to be an artist today?

From a purely professional perspective, we know that giving students the skills and confidence to create work and make their own opportunities is vital for forging sustainable careers in today’s arts industry. Making It Festival supports students to build horizontal, cross-disciplinary professional networks, to collaborate and to have more career options than just waiting for a call from an agent or promoter.

To me though, Making It Festival connects with a deeper artistic idea. It provides a platform for students to present work that feels true to them, reflective of the breadth and diversity of their lived experience and speaks directly to the complexity of our times.

The American musician and activist Nina Simone explained this better than I ever could:

"An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times... At this crucial time in our lives when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don’t think you can help but be involved...

Young people – Black and white – know this, that is why they are so involved in politics. We will shape and mould this country, or it will not be moulded and shaped at all anymore. How can you be an artist and not reflect the times? That, for me, is the definition of an artist.”

What are some of the Festival events you’re especially excited about this year?

The strength of the Festival is in the diversity of form, idea, perspective and experience it presents, so it’s impossible to choose one event in isolation! Obviously, I’m excited to see the entire published programme, but I also can’t wait to stumble upon some of the wider Festival activity happening across our campus. I don’t want to spoil any surprises here, but students and staff should be able to feel the presence of Making It Festival a lot more than last year, and students from across the School are involved in creating surprise moments, playful installations and helping build a joyful, irreverent Festival vibe.

How does your own experience as a producer shape how you put the Festival together?

As a producer, I’ve always worked most closely with artists at the early stages of their creation process. I’m in awe of the artist’s ability to shape the messiest, most vulnerable parts of themselves into works of art that can speak directly to our present moment and reverberate through the centuries. My work as a producer is all about engineering environments in which artists can take wild leaps into the creative unknown. I want them to feel supported and free to be audacious, imaginative, silly, angry, provocative… Making art is a huge risk, whatever age or stage of your career you’re at, and all artists deserve and require our support if we expect them to continue helping us imagine the possibility of a better future.

Our invitation to the students sharing work at Making It Festival is: be bold, take a risk, share the work that feels closest and truest to you. Our responsibility as producers in return is to create an environment, in this case, a Festival, that confidently holds, supports and celebrates that work – that declares loudly and proudly “your work is valuable. You are brilliant. Keep going!”

Making It Festival is part of a wider programme of artist development activity called Making It. Could you tell us more about this, and how it's helping students take that next step into the professional world?

Guildhall's Making It programme is extra-curricular, runs throughout the year and offers funding, workshops and events to students and alumni to support them to build sustainable careers. Making It acknowledges that the transition from student to professional artist is often precarious, and aims to provide support to artists at this pivotal moment, helping them to build sustainable and fulfilling careers. Both the Festival and the wider programme encourage students to build collaborative professional relationships with each other that will sustain, support and inspire them long beyond their time at Guildhall.
 

What do you hope audiences will take away from this year’s Festival? 

I hope audiences get a sense of the extraordinary breadth of artistic brilliance contained within our Guildhall student community. This year, we’re encouraging audiences to attend multiple events throughout the programme. So, if you usually just come to see GradEx, you might also be tempted to check out Opera Makers or The Making of Us, or one of our Collaborative Performance Making or Electronic & Produced Music showcases, and encounter an art form and a group of artists you’re not already familiar with. This sense of eclecticism, porosity and multi-disciplinarity is at the heart of Making It Festival. 
    

How does Making It Festival fit into the bigger picture of what Guildhall is all about?

Teachers across Guildhall have long been supporting students to take artistic risks, be inventive, experiment and create. Making It Festival amplifies that work, celebrates it and gives space for new art to intermingle with established canonical works. One of the thrilling things about Guildhall is its ability to hold multiple artistic forms, ideas, eras and experiences at the same time. Where else could you see one of the oldest and most celebrated English operas in Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas one week, and 20 brand-new performances by our dynamic and diverse acting cohort the next?! Our School holds the classical and the contemporary in conversation with each other with rigour, sensitivity and skill.

What does “making it” mean to you?

Too often, we’re told that in order to “make it” in the world, we need to prioritise our own ambitions, be competitive and conform to methods and behaviours that are received as the norm by society. We’re also told that we’ve “made it” when we’re rich and famous.

I’m not so sure about that.

We wanted to suggest that “making it” can mean making your own work, in your own words, on your own terms. It could mean collaborating with your friends. It could mean making something that is beautiful and true to you, but that doesn’t meet societal or commercial expectations of success. It could mean reinventing notions of “success” altogether.

When I was starting out in my career as a producer, I came across an ensemble-based contemporary theatre company called the Rude Mechs, who are based in Austin, Texas. I found their mission statement inspiring, and the words continue to inspire me today. In it, they write about their experience of living in Austin, but it could easily also apply to being a student in a community like Guildhall:

“We are lucky to live in a community this creative and hard working and confident and intelligent. All this new work and all these open minds. We are lucky to live in a community where artists support one another, rather than compete with one another – where we lift each other up instead of trying to tear each other down.

…We are lucky to live in a city that is full of bands and reads a lot of books and likes the outdoors and knows that a creative community isn’t just the money-generating ‘movers and shakers’ but also the teenage punk rockers and the quirky artist who builds spaces from trash and the hippies with their butterfly bicycles and the students making films and plays and music and their own new thing, whatever the new form will be.

…Here we have friends and colleagues who know the value of a life lived making art with comrades and taking time to relax on the patio and share a beer and not get all het up about ‘making it’ because ‘making it’ isn’t how much money is in your bank account or how famous you are, or how ‘respected’ or ‘hot’. But how rich the hours in your day are, surrounded by people you love and admire, in a beautiful place that is both a safety net and the trapeze high above it.”

Making It Festival runs from 17 June to 3 July 2025, with performances, installations and events taking place across Guildhall School’s Silk Street and Milton Court buildings. Tickets start at just £5, with most events free to attend.

Explore the full line-up and book your tickets at gsmd.ac.uk/makingitfest

Find out more about the year-round Making It artist development programme at gsmd.ac.uk/making-it