Gateshead International
Festival of Theatre
Previous GIFT Festivals
GIFT 2024
Watch 2024 festival trailer
Fri 03 May - Sun 05 May 2024
GIFT: Gateshead International Festival of Theatre, North East England's premiere platform for contemporary theatre, returned in May 2024 with a vibrant programme of live performances, immersive installations, creative workshops and thought-provoking discussions from international and local artists.
Credit: Von Fox Productions
The GIFT Exchange 2023
Fri 28 Apr - Sun 30 Apr 2023
Building on the rich conversations that started at GIFT 2022, and our online GIFT Exchange in 2021, this year we returned to the heart of Gateshead for a series of events premised on the notion of exchange. Events took a range of formats including workshops, creative walks, conversations, socials and sharings - all designed to bring artists and audiences together in ways that allowed for connection and a genuine exchange of ideas.
'Balancing Acts' Residency and Sharing by Rachael Clerke
GIFT 2022
Fri 29 Apr - Sun 1 May 2022
Watch 2022 festival trailer
Placing artistic experimentation and collaboration at its core, GIFT returned in 2022, with an exciting programme of performances, conversations, and workshops taking place in locations across Gateshead, and online. Created for artists and audiences in the North East of England and across the world, GIFT is an annual three day festival providing a meeting point for meaningful exchange between artists and audiences.
Credit: Von Fox Productions
The GIFT Exchange 2021
The GIFT Exchange offered three days of in-depth, online informal workshops, panel events and conversations, bringing artists together to build collective partnerships and ideas for the future. The events included workshops on artist care, and panel discussions on sustainable global cultural exchange amongst others.
Designed for theatre and performance artists and fans in the North East of England and across the world, our second ‘pandemic’ festival offered an exploratory and creative digital platform for people to connect, following an extremely challenging year for the arts. The GIFT Exchange followed on from GIFT 2020's online lockdown edition which linked up thousands of audience members, across over 50 countries.
Tutorials by Oliver Zahn at The GIFT Exchange, 2021
GIFT 2020
"The annual extravaganza was moved ingeniously online for a weekend of shows united in their celebration of togetherness" (The Guardian)
GIFT 2020 was a big, beautiful, online experiment!
Thousands of people all across the world in over 50 countries tuned into 36 performances, installations and interactive events.
GIFT 2020 was one of the first performance festivals globally to pivot online in response to the Covid 19 Pandemic, offering artists an opportunity to experiment with their practice, and providing a much needed meeting point for audiences and participants at a time of isolation.
You can read more about GIFT's move online in The Guardian or Contemporary Theatre Review.