BA Theatre & Performance

Core modules include:

Analysing Theatre & Performance

How do theatrical stories allow us to examine and reimagine our impression of the world today?  What practical qualities do theatre makers return to – or reinvent – in creating meaning in performance?  In this introduction to theatre and performance, you will share your interpretations and expand the ways you see and think about theatre in relation to the world today. You will learn how to be a confident spectator and reader of theatre through a range of diverse and topical performances in local or in London-based venues. Previous trips have included the National Theatre, RSC Live, Peking Opera, the West End, and smaller, innovative fringe venues.

Introduction to Scriptwriting

No creative practitioner can make an outstanding screen or stage production without advanced knowledge of storytelling. This is a practice module in which you will create original scripts for the screen or stage. Learning in this module develops your critical understanding of key storytelling issues such as narrative, character, dialogue, and place. Scriptwriting practice will include both individual and collaborative forms of writing and rewriting. You will engage with discourses around scriptwriting emerging from screenwriting and playwriting studies, including projects for decolonising scriptwriting traditions.

Staging Texts: Production Skills, Design and Performance

In a series of dynamic seminars and technical hands-on workshops, you will focus on a range of behind-the-scenes practices involved in production, performance and design ahead of an assessed final project. Over the course of the term, you will develop new understandings towards technical skills and scenography (including sound design) to broaden your perspectives and practical skill sets across theatre production. You will work collaboratively to conceptualise a final project that creatively and critically investigates the set texts and the assessment brief. You will also develop an understanding of the professional contexts and working conditions of theatre careers in these areas through you own application of skills to performance contexts.

Radical Forms in Theatre & Performance

Since the late nineteenth century, in an era ravaged by war and enormous political upheaval, theatre and performance makers have engaged in innovative and often radical experimentation with the aim of challenging the status quo and rehearsing alternative futures. This module introduces you to practitioners whose interrogation of the possibilities of performance have influenced many artists working today. You will investigate an exciting range of historical and contemporary texts and performance practices, and through a dynamic mix of lectures, seminar discussions and practical workshops, explore the key themes and preoccupations that have marked radical and experimental performance since the late nineteenth century.

Devising Performance: Politics and Citizenship

In this module, you will continue to develop your identity as an artist-practitioner. Engaging with contemporary socio-political contexts and devising practices you will work collaboratively to create a series of performance experiments. You will build a toolbox for performance making by being introduced to a diversity of critical concepts devising techniques and technical skills workshops. Exploring the interplay of theory and practice in contemporary performance will be key to developing your own artistic works. Your creative practice may take you to the street, the gallery, online, the halls of power, or to an intimate reflection on yourself.

Optional modules include:

Comedy on Stage and Screen

This module gives you the opportunity to study comedy on stage and screen, encompassing film, television, theatre and stand-up comedy. You will engage with the relevant critical vocabulary and contextual knowledge to explore how humour is created, consumed and debated, across a range of genres and practices. Case studies may include classic and contemporary film comedies (for example, screwball comedy, black comedy); musical comedies (such as The Book of Mormon); stand-up comedy (for example, Ali Wong, Hannah Gadsby); sitcoms (such as Friends); or the work of specific creative practitioners (such as Joe Orton).

Please note that all modules are subject to change.

Core modules include:

Please note that students can select one of the following two core modules.

Community and Collaborative Performance Practices

In this module, you will have the opportunity to develop your professional practice by collaboratively making a creative project for a non-traditional theatre context for and/or with, a particular community setting. You will work with professional community partners to make creative work that may include theatre in education, theatre for young audiences, drama workshops in community centres or nursing homes, museums, educational theatre resources, performances in parks, playgrounds, other site-specific locations or work in disability arts or LGBTQIA+ contexts. In this applied theatre project you will develop areas of specialism such as workshop facilitation, performing, writing, devising, producing, technical management, design and marketing.

Independent Critical Project

This module represents a major piece of independently researched written work, with a limited individual creative component. It provides you the opportunity to engage with an independently selected topic of interest, as well as enhances your independent critical thinking and self-directed study skills, while being guided by a supervisor. This module may be offered in place of the practical strand in Year 2.

Performance, Identity and Culture 

On this module, you will explore the construction, representation and theatrical performance of diverse modes of identity such as gender, sexuality, class, nation, ethnicity or disability.  We will consider how these intersect with the performance of identity in culture more generally, asking how theatre and performance can both reinforce particular identity positions and stereotypes, and can also expose or contest narrow, oppressive or exclusionary identity positions. We will investigate the work of theatre practitioners in relation to specific socio-historical, theoretical and theatrical frameworks, and will consider a range of performance forums such as public installations.

Optional modules include:

Directing and Dramaturgy 

On this module you will explore the roles of director and dramaturg as artistic leaders and examine these roles within collaborative theatre making practices. Through a series of hands-on studio workshops, you will develop an understanding of key research, rehearsal, and staging processes involved in creating performance. You will consider the ways in which directors and dramaturgs work with actors and creative teams to create performance.

There are three core areas that this module focuses on:

1. Providing you with a firm grounding in play analysis and dramaturgical strategies so you can confidently interrogate the connection between text (in the broadest sense) and live performance
2. Enabling you to experiment with rehearsal techniques in a studio environment and to learn new ways of analysing the practices of other directors
3. Offering you models of directorial practice that you can draw on to realise your creative ideas in performance.

From Acting to Performance 

On this module, you will practically explore the actor’s role in theatre making and learn how it has been shaped and practiced in different cultural and artistic traditions. You will reflect closely on your practical experience of approaches to building and performing a character, before exploring practical strategies aimed at decentring and challenging the idea of character. Drawing on these strategies, you will develop an assessed solo performance exercise, working within the vibrant tradition of Performance and Live Art. Through the process of researching, creating, and performing your unique solo exercise, you will discover and communicate what it can mean, in this context, to act.

Reworking Shakespeare in Performance 

This Shakespeare module encompasses a range of media, including adaptation, international performance and contemporary theatrical experiment. It invites you to think about Shakespeare as a prism through which contemporary issues, such as decolonisation, gender, race and social class, have been reflected and inflected. How can we rework Shakespeare to speak to relevant social and political issues of today? Working in groups, with reference to these examples and to relevant theory, you will produce your own creative response to a Shakespeare play and reflect critically on the creative and intellectual choices you make.

Placements and Employment Skills

Through taught sessions you will gain relevant employment skills. You will then have the opportunity to apply these skills through self-directed study. You will either a) self-organise a placement to undertake in an industry or organisation of your choice or b) undertake a detailed examination of an industry, organisation or role of your choice. Students will develop their approach to the written assessment supported by workshop discussion, and tutor and peer feedback, and in doing so will also develop their pitching and presentation skills.

In the summer term of the previous year, a session will provide advice on how to secure a placement. 

Please note that all modules are subject to change.

Core modules include:

Please note that students can select one of these core modules.

Advanced Theatre Making Project

The Advanced Theatre Making Project represents the culmination of your creative practice theatre and performance. This major project is an opportunity to achieve your practical ambitions, to engage with key critical debates and to develop your own theatre making specialism within a group. Forming an ensemble, you will research, prepare, plan and deliver the performance work alongside supervision, culminating in showings at the end of year festival.

Creative Research Project

A major piece of independent research with a creative component (realised individually or in pairs), which builds on practical work in any of the disciplines of film, theatre and television in earlier years of the degree. The written work will be carried out individually. Projects can include, for example: 

• a script (any medium) 
• desktop documentary 
• video essay 
• filmed demonstration/experiments (max. two minutes) 
• storyboard 
• a theatre design project with one realised element  
• performed fragments/experiments (max. 15 minutes) 
• performance lecture.

Each creative research project will need to be approved by the Department before commencement and will be allocated a supervisor. Supervisory meetings may be individual or, where appropriate, in groups, where individual work in progress may be shared.  

Dissertation  

This module represents your major piece of independent work, the culmination of your critical writing on the course. As such, the module aims to test your ability to apply accumulated skills and knowledge to an area of individual interest in an extended essay on a topic not directly taught on the course, and which is initiated and developed independently but under supervision. You will have the opportunity to develop core skills related to your dissertation through taught classes in the autumn and spring terms.  

Optional modules include:

Performance & Design: Site, Scenography and Installation

Performance & Design will explore the scope and potential of theatre and performance design by investigating historical and contemporary approaches to scenography. In a mixture of practical and critical workshops, you will study the creative application of the visual, aural and spatial elements of design through a rich array of performance environments and a dynamic range of innovative and international performance practices, from digital experiments to site-specific performances. The module will support you in analysing the practice of pioneering designers (such as Jocelyn Herbert and Josef Svoboda), facilitate collaborations with the National Theatre Archive, and enable masterclasses on contemporary approaches to design with visiting designers and/or scholars. 

Adaptations across Stage and Screen

You will explore contemporary practices of adaptation in performance and on screen through a series of creative experiments and case study analyses. You will also examine the politics and the disruptive potential of adaptation as a process. Areas of exploration may include: relocating narratives in time and space, Intercultural adaptation, queer adaptations, cultural appropriation, transposing stories across form and genre, retelling stories. You will be able to specialise in the discipline of your choice (film, theatre, television), thinking about adaptation in relation the particular area of practice that interests you.  

Practice as Research  

It is a practical theatre module and focuses on making research-led creative work. The integration of other mediums, such as film, installation and digital work will be welcome. In small groups, you will make practical responses to a series of research-led case studies. You will also extend your knowledge of craft, technical, performance and creative skills.

Identity, Agency, Advocacy: Diversity and Representation in Film, Television and Theatre

In this module, we explore questions concerning diversity and inclusion that are currently receiving much high-profile attention and debates in a number of different contexts, within and across film, television and theatre. We undertake close analysis of screen and stage representations that pertain to the complex interconnection of issues such as class, disability, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality. We combine our intersectional approach with an examination of relevant industrial, political and socio-cultural contexts and debates, and we explore how diversity and inclusion work intersects with the process of making. We pay particular attention to different kinds of minority and/or marginalized identities, as well as the efforts made by campaigners and advocates to push for equitable and meaningful representation. Films, programmes and plays to feature on the module may include: Fresh Off the Boat; Get Out; Goodbye CP; Jubilee; Kiss, Marry, Kill; The Slave; Transparent.

Independent Essay 

With the agreement, support and feedback of an academic supervisor, you will independently shape your own research project. You will choose a focused aspect of the film, theatre and/or television industries that is of special interest to you, and that you have questions about. In dialogue with your supervisor, you will develop these questions, and plan the best way to conduct research into your area of special interest, so that you can find out what you want to know. You will write critically about your research journey and your research findings in a 5000-word essay.

Television: Exploring Fictional Worlds 

This module explores the immersive nature of television fiction storytelling in both long-form and limited construction. Television’s fictional worlds can span years, shifting and changing across their lifetimes or be told in their entirety over a short serial. They are constructed and explored through creative decisions pertaining to the use of camera, performance, post-production, and so on. Through a set of case studies we will explore a selection of programme in depth, each covered in two to three weeks of teaching. Looking at a selection of episodes (or a whole run for short serials) we will explore these fictional worlds from different angles, which can include aesthetics, storytelling, social and cultural contexts, marketing and distribution, audiences and fandom, production and industry contexts. Genres may include but are not limited to telefantasy, soap, melodrama, crime drama, period drama (these are subject to change based on staffing availability).

Cities on Screen

The city has long been a favoured subject of the cinema, which has shaped, influenced, mythologized, and invented the city. Television’s representation of the city, both its interiors and exteriors, has helped bring the world into our homes. This module explores film and television’s encounter with the city through a series of city case studies. It explores iconographic cinematic cities as well as less familiar spaces worldwide. It explores humans’ relationships with the city, the everyday routines, the struggle to survive and the flights of fantasy. This module will consider how the city is intertwined with class, race, migration, labour, architecture, geography and nation, along with wider concerns of space and place.   

Contemporary Documentary  

The module examines some of the fundamental issues in recent and current documentary film-making for film and television. The module does so by exploring a number of case studies that, individually and collectively, consider documentary in terms of the aesthetic diversity and complexity of existing practice, and particular attention will be paid to the relationship between production process and aesthetics as well as politics of representation. The case studies are drawn from both Anglophone and non-Anglophone contexts, and may include: animated documentary, Chinese documentary, docudrama, documentary and authorship, documentary and poetry, ethnographic documentary, mockumentary, and observational documentary.

Cinema, Spectacle, Technology  

Cinema has a long tradition of seeking to guarantee its market share through the spectacular, but the spectacular is also frequently derided as just entertainment, unworthy of sustained examination. In this module we will explore the ways in which film style, technology, economics, narrative and culture intersect at key moments in the history of spectacular cinema. We will also study how spectacular cinema has been understood and responded to, looking at key debates in film scholarship, film criticism, and in mainstream and trade press.  

World Cinema: Creative Peaks

World Cinema: Creative Peaks looks at film history and geography through a democratic and inclusive approach. Rather than separating Hollywood from the rest of the world, it frames world cinema as a polycentric phenomenon with peaks of creation in different places and periods. Instead of establishing primacies and hierarchies, it identifies common tropes and cross-pollinations beyond national and cultural borders. Focusing on new realist movements and new waves from around the world, the module will analyse productions from France, Germany, Japan, Brazil, Iran, as well as from the Inuit and other indigenous populations, demonstrating how they compare and inter-relate. 

Please note that all modules are subject to change.