BA (Hons) Drama: Performance, Politics and Society

This module introduces a range of theoretical perspectives that can be used to analyse diverse forms of performance including theatre, live art, play texts, dance, and performance in the expanded field. The module also examines historical and contemporary contexts and issues to shed light on creative and theoretical developments and the work of specific playwrights, performance makers and theorists. You'll be asked to engage in analysis of individual plays and performances, considering the contextual influences of history and culture as well as genre and form. A variety of approaches are covered, which can be used either individually or in conjunction, with the intention of providing you with the tools necessary for rigorous critical and conceptual interpretation. This module will provide the conceptual basis for further and more detailed study in Years Two and Three of the degree programme. This module also introduces you to a range of academic study skills through a series of special classes as well as an essay sample submitted to your personal tutor. 

 The module will:

• Encourage the ability to think critically about performance (on page and stage), and spectatorship
• Identify cultural influences as they relate to theatre production
• Promote critical evaluation of diverse forms of performance
• Provide an analytical and comparative approach to evaluating critical theories

This module introduces the concept of 'dramaturgy' as the process of thinking about all the different elements that constitute a theatre experience: the composition of performance. It also looks at different 'dramaturgies', that is, different ways of telling stories through performance, exploring a range of methodologies post Stanislavski and integrating a diverse range of texts.

The module will encourage you to understand the different roles in creating work, and to start putting ideas on their feet; introduce you to different ways of decoding a play, discovering its embedded clues and meanings and exploring how writing is composed; encouraging you to consider carefully how rehearsal and preparation processes can lead to creating 'in the moment' live performance in front of an audience; explore how ethics and politics inform dramaturgical decisions, particularly with regard to issues of representation; and examine how harnessing the creativity of individual members of a theatre-making team, facilitating new collaborative theatremakers.

Therefore, the module is primarily concerned with interpretation and collaboration.  We will work both analytically and practically, exploring the necessary constant dynamic between the two (praxis), and students will be expected to read a range of theoretical texts, experience live performance and undertake other appropriate research (e.g. online) to provide context to their studies, and put this into action in a practical presentation. 

It will be taught by experienced theatre-makers, mainly in seminar-workshops involving analysis of text, practical exercises, lecture inputs and discussion.

This module addresses various approaches to imaginative, physical, and vocal training of the actor drawing from a wide range of Twentieth Century key practitioners. You'll be introduced to a selection of approaches to ensemble training that will include the core skills and principles needed for this practice.  In tandem will explore key research strategies, and you will carry out your own experimentation and critical questioning.

Practical exploration of the ensemble is complimented by seminar discussions and film screenings that assist you in making links between historical, contemporary and cultural precedents and what you are discovering in your own training and experiments. The film screenings on the course provide an introduction to the type of work made by a range of ensemble practitioners during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Each practical session is framed thematically in relation to ensemble practice. The seminars focus on the investigation the work of a selection of key historical Twentieth Century pioneers of ensemble training and practice. Their work, and methodologies, will be examined within their respective historical, socio-political and cultural contexts. Practitioners include, for example, Eugenio Barba, Pina Bausch (Laban, Wigman and Jooss), Augusto Boal, Michael Chekhov, Jerzy Grotowski, and Jacques Lecoq (and Suzanne Bing), Konstantin Stanislavsky, SoulWork and Kristine Landon-Smith and their heritages in companies such as: Black Mime Theatre Company, Cardboard Citizens; Complicite; Forced Entertainment; Frantic Assembly; Improbable; Progress Theatre; Station House Opera; Sasha Waltz and Guests; Song of the Goat; Tamasha, and Ariane Mnouckhine. 

Through this symbiotic practical and theoretical work, you focus on how meaning is generated in performance, and begin to ask basic questions about Theatre Making, to explore further in your own work and your analysis of material created by other artists. 

One departmental visit will take place in the autumn term to a London venue to see the work of a company working integrally with the idea of the ensemble, or for whom ensemble training is a core process.  Students will be asked to write a 1000-word essay critically analysing the work of their ensemble company drawing on the texts studied on the module.  This component enables you to begin to acquire a critical vocabulary with which to discuss, and reflect on, your own performance-making and practice as research.  In the final post-show evaluation seminar, you will be guided to understand how to apply such a methodology to the development of your own company's practical performance, and the critique of others' work.

In this module, you'll explore key issues in community, applied, and political drama and performance through a focus on critical analysis of case studies. Weekly topics will address a wide range of forms and genres. The plays, companies, and performances discussed will be evaluated through the application of relevant theoretical frameworks, with an emphasis on influential philosophical and ideological trends of the 20^th and 21^st century.

You'll consider a thematic topic each week through the study of a related performance and will analyse the work with reference to assigned critical readings. Topics will include, for example, theatre for development, postcolonial theatres, youth theatre, feminist and queer performance, and others, and these will be contextualised within an exploration of post-structuralism, globalisation, neoliberalism, post-Cold War international relations, and other global political issues. This module will provide broad subject knowledge alongside fundamental skills in research and critical reflection, and will prepare students for further and more detailed study in subsequent years.

This module continues to embed study skills introduced in Critical Dialogues A with the integration of an introductory session on research and writing methodologies.

This module aims to introduce you to the fundamental principles of Scenography. The term Scenography derives from the Greek sceno-grafika and can be understood as 'writing in space'. The practice of Scenography is concerned with the dramaturgical exploration of space, the parameters of which might be described as all that exists in the performance space pertaining to the senses, for example, the visual/aural language of the performance. Scenography can be understood as a relational practice that occurs between/betwixt the design(ed) elements. This module will allow you to explore Scenography as a complex system of signs by which we can both examine and imagine the potential of space, through decoding/encoding the performative space.

This module will allow you to explore Scenography as a complex system of signs by which we can both examine and imagine the potential of space, through decoding/encoding the performative space.

You'll practically explore and critically examine Scenography as a dramaturgical system through 5 Scenographic Disciplines:

1. Costume
2. Lighting
3. Set and Object
4. Sound
5. Stage Management

Through these disciplines, you'll be introduced to a range of key concepts, practitioners, and practical processes relating to Scenography.

This module will focus on the relationship between play, plays and playing in socially-engaged and political theatre. `Play' as a concept will be explored from many perspectives, including its importance in creative learning, play as a tool for devising theatre, playfulness in performative relationships to audience and the `play' as a written text for interpretation.'

You'll explore the process of creating ensemble performance in response to studies of key play methods and devised/written plays, and playful storytelling, studied on the module and how they can be interpreted in contemporary contexts. Performances can be in any space that is, or is not, designated as a theatre and you'll explore playfulness in this context and the type of encounter designed for spectators.

Theatre Making 1 is the culmination of the first year's work for BA Drama and Theatre Arts and Performance, Politics and Society and draws on the experiences in the other first-year units.

It is an opportunity to explore theatre-making in a creative and inventive way, applying analytic and research skills to the practical realisation of performance pieces.  You'll build on your knowledge of different performance styles, approaches and traditions gained in the year: a presentation of exciting and innovative work, consolidating and building on the learning outcomes the first year of study. In this respect, it provides not only a culmination of the first year but a springboard for your next two years' work.

You'll gain practical experience of the relationship between the different roles that make up theatre-making teams, with an opportunity to share the demands of these roles as a collective. Team-working is at the heart of this project, exploring the dynamics of leadership, decision-making and the relationship between operational/organisational concerns and the realisation of an artistic vision. 

The module is based on mounting a programme of short `scratch' performances shared with peers.  Each performance will demonstrate a company's exploration of a set stimulus.  Although it is expected that performances are executed with polish and professionalism, they are also performative expressions of ideas that should have a further creative life.  Therefore, the presentations that accompany each performance are crucial in articulating each company's artistic vision and demonstrating an understanding of the processes that could realise that vision. 

Each student explores self-nominated roles within performance, direction, dramaturgy, scenography and stage management. It is expected that each performance group is assessed on its collective contribution and achievement in lighting/sound design, scenography, costumes and the devising process which can include the management of a basic script, from the stimulus provided. For Health and Safety reasons, all students operating any equipment or rigging set must have attended a relevant session with a qualified member of staff.

This lecture/ seminar series introduces you to key aspects of modern and postmodern thought, culture and theatre. It aims a) to examine historical and cultural contexts, and b) to explore and analyse the theoretical and culture concerns and practices which have been understood as modernist and postmodern. It is interdisciplinary, considering not only practices in theatre but in other areas of cultural production. 

Questions of Performance delivers training by introducing students to practitioners’ theories practically and critically, through options of learning and teaching clustered around questions, methodological enquiries and issues that guide contemporary practice such as, ‘character,’ ‘image,’ ‘self,’ etc. Students are asked to broaden their historical, theoretical and embodied knowledge of Twentieth Century and contemporary practice, to contextualise their learning within current performance practice and/or debates in performance studies, and to begin to formulate their own research questions.

Students will work in small groups (3 or 4 students per group) to research a Company whose practice interests them, in order to co-write a 15-minute paper that they will present. (Company to be agreed with convenor)

The students are tasked with researching:

• The history of the Company’s artistic practice
• The impact of the sociopolitical contexts within which their work has developed
• Their core audiences/participating groups and individuals
• Mission statements/Vision. How these have developed and how they are arrived at
• Decision making structures within organisations, and how this may have changed over time
• Working practices (ie terms and conditions)
• Structures (How many staff are there? How many are full time? How are freelancers managed and supported?)
• Key policies (ie child and vulnerable adult safeguarding, equal opportunities etc)
• Methodologies

Students will be expected to make direct contact with organizations and to interview a range of personnel (artistic and administrative). Support will be provided by departmental staff to develop links with existing partners and other relevant organisations. Students should visit the Company or participants, and observe meetings/workshops/rehearsals. They should access relevant documents such as Annual reports, reviews, websites, and social media. They should also access academic writing that references the Company. Each student will keep an individual research log, which will evidence their participation in the group's research process. This will include informal reflections on key sources, methodologies, and observations/interactions with the Company.

Students will be assessed as a group for the presentation, but individual marks will be adjusted based on evidence of each student’s contributions.

Description TBC

Our academic departments are developing exciting elective ideas to allow you to broaden your education, either to develop vocationally orientated experiences or to learn more about contemporary society, culture and politics. You’ll be able to choose safe in the knowledge that these modules have been designed for non-subject specialists and to bring students from different disciplines together. For example, you may want to take introductions to areas such as Law, Education, the digital industries, the creative industries,think like a designer or understand the history and politics behind our current affairs.

Students choose from a range of options available within the Department.  The modules on offer may differ from year to year as they reflect staff research interests, but some examples of modules recently on offer include:

Our academic departments are developing exciting elective ideas to allow you to broaden your education, either to develop vocationally orientated experiences or to learn more about contemporary society, culture and politics. You’ll be able to choose safe in the knowledge that these modules have been designed for non-subject specialists and to bring students from different disciplines together. For example, you may want to take introductions to areas such as Law, Education, the digital industries, the creative industries,think like a designer or understand the history and politics behind our current affairs.

In these modules you will investigate contemporary notions of identity and culture in the UK and around the world in relation to an increasingly globalised world. Contemporary Britain is perceived as progressively more multicultural; at the same time, there is an evolving awareness of the impact of global trends in society and culture. These and other factors are challenging our extant notions of individual and collective identity and culture, as well as community.

Culture and Performance begins with a single module taken by all students in the Autumn term – 'Culture and Performance: Critical Cultural Theory'. This 10-week module introduces students to key theoretical perspectives on the function of performance for the negotiation and perpetuation of cultures and societies. Students will become familiar with current debates on interculturalism, multiculturalism, nationalism, and the globalisation of cultures, through a diverse range of historical and contemporary case studies. In weekly seminars they will be encouraged to interrogate and debate their own creative and political relationships to performance cultures of various kinds. This module will equip students with the necessary theoretical tools to effectively position themselves as artists within global, postcolonial, multicultural, and/or intercultural communities.

This module will take the shape of a highly experimental performance-making testing ground. You will be encouraged to explore, to take risks, to be self-reflexive and critically engaged. You will engage in depth with critical practice through a series of workshop/seminars, related self-led learning exercises and critical reading/viewing.

Each week will be dedicated to exploring a keyword in writing for performance, such as the composition journey, image making, different structures, character development, dialogue, and audience relationship and there will be a focus on the creative interaction between writing, dramaturgy, directing and performance - from generating written text to the live theatrical event. You will examine the different ways that writers, directors, actors and dramaturges can collaborate together to compose a text and reference existing texts and use a variety of experiential dramaturgical processes to generate and explore new ones. Texts may include new plays, radical re-workings of existing texts, adaptations from other media, verbatim, and so on. 

Drawing upon a range of theoretical positions from Aristotle to Lehman this module navigates the possibilities for writing between literary theatre and post-dramatic performance. The module will include a lively engagement with aesthetic, psychological and political issues.

Although you can choose to specialize as writer, dramaturge, performer or director, the collaborative process will always be enabled and emphasized.  Everyone will contribute to writing exercises/explorations and share creative responsibility for decisions taken on group projects. This experience will broaden your theatrical choices and enable them to create original work and gain a practical understanding of your craft. Throughout the module, you will examine the values and aesthetic principles that underpin your creative choices and your implications for the spectator's experience and the broader cultural context.

This module focuses on the acquisition and development of performance-making skills and the application of those acquired skills to the creation of a performed event. Through the Spring term workshops, supervision, student-led practice and peer support, you will identify the focus of your independent performance projects and the performance-making approaches, strategies, tools and techniques required to complete them. You will be supervised to work individually and/or collaboratively exploring, testing and developing skills specific to the focus of your projects and conceive your own research methodologies for creating performance materials. In the Spring term, the emerging material is framed as a project proposal, presented for feedback as a scratch performance and then developed into an assessed Research and Development presentation. The end-of-module assessed performances will be presented as a public festival of final-year work in the Summer term. The module represents the culmination of the performance projects you have worked on during the BA programme and allows you to take greater responsibility than before for the selection/generation of material to be worked on, the nature of the process, and the delivery of projects through performance.

More information about this module will be published soon

The Independent Research Project is an opportunity to extend your abilities as scholars by looking at a single research subject of your own choosing. Supported primarily by lectures and individual and group tutorials, it provides a chance to engage with material of personal interest, and offers the possibility of laying claim to a specific area of study. This is an opportunity to delve in detail into a subject which has excited your enthusiasm and curiosity. That chosen subject may build upon skills and knowledge gained during the degree or it may pursue suitable material that has not been substantially addressed elsewhere on the course.

There are two options for this module, either an 8,000 written submission or a 4,000-word written practice-as-research commentary coupled with a portfolio of work. The IRP requires a more sustained and focused application of the skills acquired in the writing of shorter written work, developing techniques of organisation, analysis and argumentation.

The IRP is also a course of independent study. The onus is on you to motivate yourself, to organise your studies, to contact your tutors to arrange meetings, and to draft and collate the final assignment. In doing so you will develop a new sense of your capacities, seeking out and investigating subject matter for yourself, and developing an informed critical opinion in your chosen subject area. 

During the Summer term at Level 5, you will attend an introductory talk explaining the IRP proposal and the expected scope of the research undertaken. In the autumn term of your 3^rd year, you will take the compulsory Research Methodologies module in preparation for your IRP in the Spring term. You will be assigned a tutor with corresponding interests or expertise, who will guide you in your choice of subject matter and progress, and work with you during the Spring term. It is crucial that you make contact with your tutor as soon as possible, and arrange to meet with them. Two hours of one-to-one supervision are available for each student to develop their IRP in consultation with an assigned tutor. To support your work, there will be three further lecture-seminars-workshops where you can present your work-in-progress to peers and workshop your ideas together.

This module also aligns your research project to career trajectories. You should consider, for example, not just the topic of your research, but also how its articulation is useful evidence for future employers. You should also consider engaging with external organisations and building future relationships for your careers through the Personal Professional Development programme.

This module explores art-making as a philosophical practice with particular reference to art that has been created in Japan, created by those of Japanese origin, or inspired by Japanese culture. The particular perspectives investigated cover art practice that engages with aesthetic and philosophic notions such as an 'art of spectatorship', the notion of 'daily life as art', the concept of emptiness and the concept of 'void'; and art that engages with 'nature'. 

The new ecology emphasizes indeterminism, instability and constant change. This module examines the ways in which theatre, and performance more broadly, responds to, and leads the way in thinking about climate breakdown and the impact of anthropogenic climate chaos. We consider a range of play texts that engage with the relationship between the human and natural world. These range from Shakespeare’s work, that engenders both harmony and disorder in the relationships between human and non-human worlds, through to nineteenth –century Romanticism. We look at ways in which the theatre engages with the scientific community to present facts and statistics about climate breakdown through performance. We ask questions about the ethics of the theatre as a carbon neutral medium, and explore site-specific audio tours. We visit the Arcola Theatre, whose radical sustainability policy begins with the aim to become the world’s first carbon neutral theatre. We end by considering performative responses to the climate crisis through, for example, Extinction Rebellion, and the activists from Liberate Tate who protested against BP’s sponsorship of the gallery.

This module takes up the two strands introduced in Culture and Performance in Term one, namely black American and British drama from the twentieth century to the present. The texts studied investigate points of convergence and divergence in representing blackness and black people’s experiences on both sides of the Atlantic. From the American perspective the chronological starting point is Angelina Weld Grimke’s legacy and how the drama produced throughout the 1920s prefigures the later influential cultural activism of the 1960s Black Arts Movement and continues women playwrights’ longstanding associations with experimental writing. In the British context, the initial investigations reside imperfectly in white writers’ representations and the dominance of black performers from abroad due to the absence of any plays penned by a black writer in Britain before the 1930s.

The module initially creates a broad contextual and generic scope which is narrowed to single-authored studies in the latter half. This enables students to access key informing debates as historically specific, but also to inter-weave these in order to construct a continuum in theatre histories which have been characterised by absence, sporadic inclusion or distortion. Attention to single authors enables detailed application of these ideas to a body of the dramatists’ work and requires the reading of no fewer than two of their plays each week. From time-to-time, there will be comparative analyses of plays by white peers bearing in mind the dominance of white-centred experience in both nations’ artistic contexts and theatre complexes. Theorisation models will expose students to Afro-centric and Euro-centric examples. By virtue of the newness discursively of the field of Black British writing and drama in particular, the module is to be viewed as a series of incisive snapshots aimed to facilitate student interest with the expectation that further research will add to the emerging critical mass. In particular, the historical dominance of Caribbean-derived experiential models from the 1970s-2000s is later contoured by the increased Nigerian-centring theatrical presence of neo-millennial playwrights which, although beyond the scope of the module in any detail, students are welcome to pursue this as a research area for the assessed essay.

Given the political and ideological conditions of enslavement and colonisation heritages, the module acknowledges the shared ground of racial oppression (amongst other inhibitors) but aims to explore the nuanced and distinctive politicised aesthetics which have emerged across the century as responsive to the very different locations of the United States and the United Kingdom.

The module will pose the question who musical theatre is for, contrasting the idea of the audience with that of the community and introducing you to the work of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East (a community theatre with a special interest in musicals), the black British theatre company NitroBeat, and the British Asian company, Rifco. During the first half of the term, you will attend lectures by professional writers and directors on musical theatre for specific constituencies and participate in seminar discussions on musicals that have been produced by these three companies. Topics for discussion will include the formation of diaspora communities in the UK and the sub-cultural forms through which young people in these communities shape distinctive identities. You will explore the notion of hybridity as it functions in the cross-cultural and intercultural construction of alternative musical theatre forms and considers the political implications of multiculturalism for British society. In the second half of term, you will undertake a case study of one theatre company or musical, researching its history and aesthetic aims by means of interviews, short observations/placements, critical analysis of performance and work in libraries/archives.

In the 21st century, political movements are becoming increasingly performative. This module brings together emerging strands of theory from Theatre & Performance and International Relations to explore the cultural performances at the root of global political movements. Many of these movements arise from marginalised or obscured cultures, and so the enactment of political campaigns frequently rests on theatricalised bids for cultural visibility.

From protest movements to revolutionary uprisings to anti-austerity campaigns, groups often seek to perform their identities in ways that evoke recognition and empathy from public audiences. These performative negotiations of identity and culture are foundational to the subsequent stagings of protest, resistance, and revolution.

This module will consider a range of recent events including the Global War on Terror, Anti-War protests, the 2011 London Riots, the Occupy Movement, the Arab Spring, the Saffron Revolution and more.

Drawing on a variety of materials including video documentary, first-person testimonies and critical theoretical analyses, you will consider the kinds of theatricality that prove efficacious in particular political circumstances.