BA (Hons) Drama: Performance, Politics and Society

This module introduces and explores critical approaches to theatre and performance through textual analysis of a range of plays. You will be provided with the critical tools to consider the contextual influences of history and culture in performance as well as genre and form. 

This module addresses various approaches to the imaginative, physical, and vocal training of the actor drawing from a wide range of Twentieth Century key practitioners.

You will 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 and contemporary precedents and what you are discovering in your own training and experiments.

You will 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 an essay analysing the show and drawing on the language of Performance Analysis and Ensemble Practice, which are introduced and explained in the seminar discussions.

This component enables you to begin to acquire a critical vocabulary with which to ‘read’ the entirety of a performance, and to articulate your responses accordingly. 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.

Theatre Making 1 is the culmination of the first year’s work for B.A. Drama and Theatre Arts 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.

Students build on their 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.

Students gain practical experience of the relationship between the different roles that make up theatre-making teams, with an opportunity to undertake 2 distinct roles. 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. 

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, playfulness in performative relationships to audience and the ‘play’ as a written text for interpretation.

Students will explore the process of creating ensemble performance in response to studies of key plays and how they can be interpreted in contemporary contexts. Performances can be located in any space that is not designated as a theatre and students will explore playfulness in the context of site-specificity and site responsiveness. An understanding of Space is central to this module; that it generates its own narratives and meanings and that space has political resonances.

This module introduces 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.

Students will 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 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 you 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, ‘questions of character,’ ‘questions of image,’ ‘questions of self,’ etc.

You will be asked to broaden their historical, theoretical and embodied knowledge of Twentieth Century and contemporary practice, to contextualise your learning within current performance practice and/or debates in performance studies, and to begin to formulate your 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.

Students will be taught through a variety of modes of delivery:

Lectures and presentations will introduce contemporary contexts that artists and arts organisations work within. Indicative contexts include primary, secondary and special schools; the criminal justice system; independent living centres for disabled people; youth and community organisations; voluntary sector organisations and charities.

Workshops will use interactive learning techniques to explore the ethical and aesthetic issues that artists and arts organisations consider when designing, delivering and evaluating projects. Students will work with relevant documentation; such as safeguarding policies, trustee’s reports and school curricula. (For example, students may work in-role as a team designing a project for young disabled adults in transition to independent living or designing an arts-based curriculum for young offenders).

Seminars will offer students the opportunity to focus on praxis; working with their peers to create presentations and provocations that explore how theory relates to practice.

Having had a grounding in some of the contexts in which Performance, Politics and Society students might work and some of the issues they need to be aware of, this module will teach students some of the key methods and methodologies used within these creative contexts such as Theatre of the Oppressed techniques, the aesthetics of access in disability arts and intergenerational practices. The focus will be on workshop facilitation and students will be assessed on this core vocational skill.

 Students will be taught through a variety of modes of delivery:

• Masterclasses led by experienced lecturer-practitioners in 'applied theatre' will explore how a variety of performance facilitation techniques are tailored to different contexts
• Seminars will explore the theoretical underpinning of facilitation practice. Students’ own research into case studies will be presented and analysed in the light of theory

Students will all have an opportunity to pilot their own workshops with peers, receiving both peer and lecturer feedback.

This module introduces students to the debates and issues about the scope and frame of the postcolonial field and its critical theory. It will specifically look at the relationship between postcolonialism and postmodernism; the shifts and tensions in the centre-periphery relations, issues of cultural imperialism and oppression and strategies surrounding the politics of culture, identity and representation. 

This module explores the relationship between visual art and theatre in both the pre-war, historical avant-gardes- such as Futurism, Dada and Surrealism- and some of the post-war, neo avant-gardes. Apart from obvious points of contact such as stage design, we will try to understand the relation between theatrical writing and performance, through art and visual imagery. 

This module investigates the relationship between modern women playwrights (writing in English) and the ways in which their work intersects with the tenets of feminist thought. Each week two polemical pieces: one on social history or feminist theory, the other on drama or theatre will be analysed in tandem with the play under discussion. 

This option focuses precisely on this dual nature of Beckett's work and offers students a chance to study and questions modern/ postmodern tensions with Beckett as a continuous and problematic case study. Students engage with the breadth of philosophical argument found in these readings: aesthetics, politics, philosophy of history, existential ontology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. 

This module offers students the chance to go beyond 'soundbite' Brecht and study this key dramatist in more detail. This module will study the career of Brecht, including the political world his drama and drama theory evolved through. Placing his work in a philosophical, historical and artistic context, this module will look at Brecht's importance for his period, his influence in post-war theatre and relevance in contemporary practice. 

This module addresses historical and contemporary links between avant garde theatre practices and political activism. It expands and deepens the study of artistic practices begun in Modernisms and Postmodernity A, with a focus on the activist elements of theatrical movements and parallel political organisations.

Through the critical analysis of 20th-century case studies, you will develop an understanding of the adoption of avant garde techniques from Dada to Live Art to 'In Yer Face' realism.

You will consider particular theatrical protest performances drawn from organisations including Bread and Puppet Theatre, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, El Teatro Campesino, Solidarity, Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, ACT-UP and more.

Through targeted critical readings, you will situate their analyses of these performances within recent scholarship on the efficacy of political performance in a globalised, postmodern world.

How do social identity categories function politically in contemporary society? What role does gender play in promoting social and political norms? Can the performance of transgressive genders and sexualities create challenges to these norms, or do we inevitably reproduce dominant frames of power and belonging? This module responds to these questions with an introduction to third wave feminism and queer theory.

The module's broad emphasis on the trangressive performance of identities will enable you to gain a comprehensive understanding of key debates in postmodern gender theory and practices.

Through an examination of plays, theatre companies, activist groups, and social performance, you will learn to apply critical concepts to the form and content of relevant performances.

Key theoretical scholarship will be considered each week alongside related play texts, videos or documentary sources. Weekly lectures will provide detailed context and provocations for further discussion/debate. Topics addressed will include late 20th and 21st century gay and lesbian theatre, postmodern feminist performance art, and queer identities broadly defined.

This module is designed to give students a detailed overview of American Theatre in the 20th Century- its texts and contexts. By looking in depth at nine plays alongside a number of key groups and movements such as the Provincetown Players, the Black Arts Movement and the American Avant Garde, and through student led presentations, we will gain a sense of the diversity and development of American Theatre throughout the century. 

This option provides a detailed examination of a range of the dramatic works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the English Renaissance to develop a broad understanding of themes, forms and issues (political, historical, theoretical and religious) characteristic of English culture during the reign of Elizabeth I and James I. 

This module explores Greek plays in their original performance context and in the context of the modern theatre. Political and social ideas and issues are explored in order to comprehend the role of theatre in Ancient Athenian society. Students will lead seminar discussion on selected topics and, where possible, plays will be viewed on stage or on video. 

This is a modul that looks back on Irish theatre tradition that is closely related to political conflict, beginning with the theatre of the Irish Revival in the early decades. After looking closely at the conservative mid-century Ireland and the work of Samuel beckett and Brendan Behan, the module returns again to theatre produced in times of conflict, particularly focussing on the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland (from 1968), before concluding with the politics of contemporary Irish drama. 

Three seminal figures in the Russian theatre of the first half of the 20th Century have had an extraordinary impact on the development of world theatre to this day: Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Avgeny Vakhtangov. This module focuses on their different views of the theatre, their directorial principles and their collaboration with actors, playwrights and designers in the context of unprecedented political and social upheaval. 

This module concentrates on texts from two periods which are particularly rich in the history of Spanish Theatre: 1580-1680 and the 20th/ 21st Century. The texts analysed in this course will be studied within a political-historical context, while questions of staging will also be covered in relation to the specificity of theatrical art in Spain. The module culminates in the study of two plays written in Catalan and the work of a Catalan performance group which often dispenses entirely with text. 

This module looks at African theatres and performances, both as products and shapers of their historical, social and cultural contexts and processes, given Africa's rich historical diversity of traditions of performance. It examines the impact of colonialism on the development of theatre in Africa, as well as the responses of these theatres to key historical facts and events in Africa. 

This module will provide you with a historical overview of alternative theatre practices in Britain since 1968. Weekly topics will address the diversity of alternative theatre practice in the late 20th century, including, for example, experimental, political, community, black and asian, gay and lesbian, and disability theatres.

The study of each particular performance, company, play or practice will be contextualised within the political and social issues of its time period. In this way you will gain a sense of the rich diversity of theatrical responses to major events of the time period. In addition, you will engage in readings and activities that further their understanding of theatre history as an academic practice.

You will be introduced to particular historiographic approaches and methods, including the treatment of various source materials such as biographies, recorded testimonies, archived documents, published reviews, and oral histories. These skills will be practiced through the development of a small digital archive project, which will provide a basis for your final essay.

Contact between British and Polish theatres stretches back at least to Jacobean players performing in Gdansk (with Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffmann [1631], for instance, partly set in “Dantzike”, after the city’s Prussian name of Danzig), through Edward Gordon Craig’s interest in the work of Stanislaw Wyspianski in the early twentieth century, to students participating in training workshops today with such companies as Teatr Zar or Song of the Goat.

Once part of the “other Europe” during the Cold War, Poland is now at the heart of the EU, with Polish one of the major “second languages” of the UK also. Cultural dialogue depends on a shared awareness of key points of reference and this module will offer an introduction to aspects
of Polish theatre history, not least as part of a history of translation into English. Each week, in both tutor- and student-led presentations, different themes will be considered, such as: repertory and “alternative” approaches to literary theatre; ensemblebased, physical or visual theatres; forms of actor training and the diversity of playwriting; individual directors’ “visions” and themes from the “national canon”; the Polish-Jewish heritage; the interplay of aesthetics and politics, of Romanticism and avant-garde, of past and present.

As the module material is in English, we will be considering what a theatre history beyond “national” borders means, through the example of the different artists whose work will be considered (from Mickiewicz to Staniewski; or between Kantor and the Theatre of the Eighth Day).

Students will examine the ways in which playwrights, directors and companies from France and from its former colonies negotiate questions of identity, emancipation, resistance and artistic innovation.

France is currently living through one of the most convulsive periods in its post-war political history. The after burns of its colonial past and the role it played in the bloody Algerian War of Independence (1954-62) are still felt on a daily basis, with tensions running high between the state and police, and what are perceived as ‘immigrants’, even though they have lived in France for three or four generations.

Urban planning and the relegation of the immigrés to the banlieues – huge tower blocks outside city centres – only exacerbate the situation. This module looks at playwrights and other theatre-makers both from France and from Africa, the Caribbean and Canada who tackle France’s colonial past, and its postcolonial present. All the theatre-makers analysed on the module illustrate how today questions of identity and ethnicity in France and in its former colonies, are live, unresolved, and fluid.

In the Culture and Performance 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 students 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.

During the Spring Term, students are offered a choice of modules given them the chance to apply the skills developed during Culture and Performance: Critical Cultural Theory to a particular theatrical/ artistic movement. Module options may change year to year due to staff availability and research area but please see below for a list of the most recent options. 

Theatre Making 3 focuses on the acquisition and development of performance making skills and the application of those acquired skills to the creation of a performed event. It represents the culmination of the performance projects you will have worked on during your degree 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.

Theatre Making 3 consists of two modules: Laboratory and Projects. You will choose to specialise in one of the following areas:

• Live Art/Performance Art
• Devised Performance
• Acting and Solo Performance
• Text and Performance
• Site-Specific Performance

Laboratory (15 credits)

This module takes the shape of a highly experimental performance laboratory. You will be encouraged to explore, to take risks, to be self-reflexive and critically engaged. You will engage in depth with your specialist area through a series of workshop/seminars, related self-led, option-based learning exercises (autocours) and critical reading. Running in parallel to these classes you will have a series of Personal and Professional Development workshops with alumni artists working in the different areas.

Projects (30 credits)

You will be encouraged to be experimental to take risks and push the boundaries of contemporary performance making and thinking. This module aims to provide the space for you to build on your previous learning, as well as to broaden your understanding of performance practices and history.

Live Art/Performance Art

By choosing this specialism, you will critically engage with experiencing, making and reflecting upon performance at the boundaries and between genres. You will explore performance that might take unconventional and or radical forms and actions and that plays with liveness, interaction and immediacy. You will gain the abilities to choose and develop your own generating material, to self-direct, self-train, compose and design as appropriate, to programme and manage a Live Art/Performance Art research, development, and rehearsal process with discipline, to document/archive, score, and evaluate your own work, and your peers.

Devised Performance

This specialism focuses on critically engaging with, experiencing, making and reflecting upon performance that is born out of devising processes. You will gain the abilities to choose and develop your own generating material, to self-direct, self-train, compose and design as appropriate, and to programme and manage a Devised Performance.

Acting and Solo Performance

Acting and Solo Performance focuses on acting as an independent creative practice and offers you the opportunity to conceive, develop and realise your Theatre Making 3 projects as solo, autonomous performers. You'll be able to choose between performing an already-existing text/score or devising/writing/composing your own work. The module is broad enough to reflect a range of contemporary practices, yet focused enough to provide a space for in-depth development of skills in and understanding of acting.

Text and Performance

This option focuses on the creative interaction between writing, dramaturgy, directing and performance – from generating written text to the live theatrical event. We will examine the different ways that writers, directors, actors and dramaturges can collaborate together to compose a text. We will 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 and verbatim.

Site-specific Performance

Site-specific Performance focuses on the place of performance as a starting point for your independent projects and considers the role of the performance site (its history, architecture, socio-political context) in shaping those projects. You'll be encouraged to take risks and push the boundaries of contemporary site-specific performance making and thinking whilst engaging critically and creatively with the genre. The option aims to provide the space to build on your previous learning, to broaden your understanding of contemporary performance making, and to develop a critical and practical understanding of site-specific performance practices/histories. 

The Major Research Project is an opportunity for final year students to develop greater depth of subject knowledge through a sustained focus on a topic of their own choosing. The research project may be pursued as EITHER a purely theoretical project resulting in a 10,000-word dissertation; OR as practice-as-research, resulting in a substantial practical project linked to a 6,000-word dissertation. Whichever route is undertaken, the major research project requires a more sustained and focused application of the research skills acquired in previous years of this degree course.

Supported by appropriate instruction from lectures and tutorials, this module also develops independent research skills, provides a chance to engage with material of personal interest, and offers the possibility of laying claim to a specific area of study. That chosen subject may build upon skills and knowledge gained during the degree or it may pursue suitable material not substantially addressed elsewhere on the course. It may be that the chosen subject area corresponds to a staff research interest; most importantly it should be an area for which the student feels both enthusiasm and curiosity.