DIVAS of Bristol…

The concept of ‘DIVAS’ was first discussed after the school announced the closure of their BA programmes in January. We felt that we needed an authentic and student-led response to the situation that our school was now in.

We wanted to create a comedic and entertaining piece of work, reflecting the wonderfully joyous atmosphere of our own school, while simultaneously confronting the real issues facing not only arts training, but the industry as a whole.

It was imperative that we were delivering a message to champion funding and training in the arts, and showing its importance to young people like ourselves. We benefitted greatly from the collaborative atmosphere of BOVTS, and what began as a conversation between a few 1st Year BA actors quickly grew as students from a wide variety of other programmes began to take interest in the project, eventually resulting in a production team spanning a huge variety of different courses and years, including MA Directing, Screen Acting, BA Production Arts and MFA Acting.

The school took a large interest in the project, and agreed that it was a great way to reclaim the narrative, especially with the backdrop of speculative news articles and catastrophising headlines.

As pre-production continued, our writers room was fueled on by stories of other arts institutions, both training and performing spaces, facing financial difficulties, which only went to further highlight the importance of the message we were trying to send through the pilot.

Overall, we wanted to celebrate the amazing, challenging and uniquely enlightening thing that is arts training, both here in Bristol and across the UK, while showing our audience the current fragility of drama schools in this country, and furthermore the uncertain future of the arts as a whole. 

In making DIVAS, our primary motivation was to elicit conversation, not just within BOVTS but beyond.

On its release date, to our pleasant surprise, we found that the pilot was being shared among other drama schools. This sparked a desire to try and push our message further as we believe that the conversation should go past drama schools and beyond.

DIVAS is satirical in its nature of poking fun at the state of the industry as a whole, and so we believe that by making art that is responsive to this, the art itself should be spoken about by anyone and everyone who cares.

Furthermore, we have a desire to continue to make episodes of DIVAS, in fact new stories and ideas are almost presented in our laps by the news on a daily basis.

The community established in the process of making DIVAS is one we want to continue fostering. We are all emerging creatives in an industry that is proving harder and harder to break into and our hope is to continue making work in where these creatives have those opportunities to poke fun at.

Our hope is to be the voice of the students, to highlight their feelings in our own way.