Our mission

Rebound Arts Festival is a three-day multidisciplinary festival based in Cork City. As we bounce back, Rebound seeks to enliven and reclaim the spaces we inhabit, inspire participants and connect diverse communities across our city. 

We aim to

• Provide an atmosphere that inspires individuals to explore their artistic expression through fruitful collaborations and conversations.
• Connect festival goers and creatives through participatory events, performances and spaces.
• Emerge from the pandemic to enliven and reclaim our city’s forgotten spaces

Rebound Arts Festival is produced by Riasc. Originating globally, emerging in Cork, Riasc is a cohort of creatives coming together as part of postgraduate training in Arts Management and Creative Producing at the Department of Theatre, School of Film, Music and Theatre, UCC. Combining our unique individual strengths and multidisciplinary experiences, Riasc presents Rebound Arts Festival, a festival that will enliven the spaces we inhabit and positively engage with diverse local communities to inspire change as we emerge from the global Covid-19 pandemic.

Riasc is the Irish language word for ‘marsh’. This name was chosen to reflect the history of the city we come together in. Just as the marshland was reclaimed to form a foundation for Cork City, so will the city be enlivened throughout Rebound Arts Festival as our stage.

Join us in exploring the five thematic strands of our festival including: Reverb, Self+Place, Unbound, Gather+Engage, and Pathways and Pitstops

• UCC Department of Theatre
• School of Film, Music and Theatre and Cork Opera House
• MA in Arts Management and Creative Producing

UCC Department of Theatre 

UCC’s Department of Theatre is unique in Ireland, and among the most distinct in the world..

Here at UCC Theatre, we believe in the artistic power of our students. Our students don’t just learn to take direction. They become independent thinkers, makers of work, and arts entrepreneurs who can think outside the box. Our students explore their voices, their physical expression and technical skills, the poetics of their imaginations, and exciting thinking and writing.

They are adventurers. Our teaching encourages students to explore, to expand, and to refine their skills, knowledge, tastes, and critical thinking. Our students devise. 

UCC’s heritage as a top global university, and its courageous stance toward the future, form the perfect integrated backdrop for how we teach and research, and for how students navigate their time with us. We delight in all forms of theatre, and our teaching explores how theatre and performance, indeed, how the mind and body working together, when daring to tell stories in new and fabulous ways, invent new futures for us all.

We believe that theatre and performance create change. Our research-led teaching means that students are invited right inside how we discover and uncover the processes that underpin the making of performance, and how we think through what we will do with theatre and performance in order that it have the brightest cultural future. This might sound pie-in-the-sky, but we are a department grounded in the reality of today’s performance world. Our faculty include prolific performance and interdisciplinary artists; experienced project managers, casting directors and producers; applied, youth and educational theatre specialists; deep-thinking theorists; and refined skills teachers. The range and scope of the expertise we represent is reflected in our delightfully diverse teaching offer and the extraordinary scope and rigour of the research we produce.

We are also an unusually interdisciplinary department.. We delight in diversity, and welcome applications from the widest range of ages, identities, and life experiences. Our interdisciplinarity is reflected particularly strongly in our Post-Graduate offers and staff research interests.

Link: https://www.ucc.ie/en/fmt/theatre/

School of Film, Music and Theatre and Cork Opera House

In February 2018, Cork Opera House and UCC launched an innovative partnership with the aim of bringing the  two organisations together to educate and inspire the next generation of arts managers, creative practitioners and professionals. Throughout this partnership, the two institutions will collaborate on every level to identify opportunities that will have a significant impact on the arts industry into the future. The partnership establishes Cork Opera House as a Learning Theatre and provides UCC with an immersive learning environment that enriches and elaborates the student experience.

Link: https://www.ucc.ie/en/fmt/operahouse/

MA in Arts Management and Creative Producing

The new MA in Arts Management and Creative Producing, jointly developed by the School of Film, Music & Theatre at UCC and Cork Opera House, was launched in 2019. The programme showcases new forms of collaboration between the academy and the profession through innovative teaching, learning and research practices. This includes a wide range of placements and mentorships through the collaborative partnership between UCC and Cork Opera House as a ‘Learning Theatre’ as well as existing professional connections with the local, national and international arts community. The new MA is  led by Dr. Marie Kelly (School of Film, Music and Theatre, UCC, and former member of the Abbey Theatre’s management and creative team) and Eibhlín Gleeson (Chief Executive, Cork Opera House). The MA in Arts Management and Creative Producing draws together the Departments of Film, Music and Theatre with  Business/Law at UCC, and the professional cultural context of Cork Opera House, working together to educate and inspire the next generation of arts managers, creative practitioners and professionals, and creating industry leaders of the future.

Link: https://www.ucc.ie/en/ckd01/