Poet Laureate Simon Armitage and composer Gavin Bryars consider what happens when their respective art forms are brought together. They discuss the pleasures and perils of crossing between the two disciplines, with excerpts from their work woven throughout, including tracks by Armitage’s post rock/ambient outfit LYR, and Bryars’ influential 1971 work Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. Chaired by Dr Kimberly Campanello of the University of Leeds.

How do music, plot, staging, action, dance and performance combine to produce meaning for an opera audience? Taking a close look at Thomas Adès's The Tempest, Professor Edward Venn of the University of Leeds and choreographer and director Aletta Collins – who choreographed the opera's premiere in 2004 – explore the conversation between different elements in opera. They also consider notions of confinement and restricted movement in all three of Adès's operas.

From Monteverdi to Monty Python, cross-dressing, gross-out humour and a preoccupation with the grotesque seem to offer a release from the constrictions of moral codes and social conventions. Tenor Daniel Norman takes a trip into transgression in the company of Professor Alan O'Leary. Drawing on the theories of philosopher and critic Mikhail Bakhtin, they discuss “the licence to misbehave” in opera, film and performance. Part of the DARE partnership between Opera North and the University of Leeds

“In cinema you are a spectator; in opera you are present. I’m fascinated by the notion that we witness in opera: we have to endure.” Ranging from Ancient Greece to The Godfather, and focusing on the operas of Puccini and Verdi, renowned art historian Professor Griselda Pollock discusses how violence is represented in painting, sculpture, film and literature, how it is performed in opera, and its implications. Produced as part of the DARE partnership between Opera North and the University of Leed