Theatre and Performance BA (Hons)

This theory led module is focused on the social, critical, and ethical ‘challenges’ that theatre and performance makers face in the 21st century. Through a series of lectures and seminars, you will be provided with examples of critical arguments that allow you to consider theatre and performance from plural and sometimes competing perspectives. The overall aim is to give you a grounding in developing your own independent arguments on difficult, challenging, or ethically complex subjects such as city resilience, population growth, the fourth industrial revolution, class and equality, and climate justice through the frameworks such as cultural materialism, doughnut economics, Global North philosophies (universalism, liberalism, poststructuralism), Global South philosophies (pluriversal thinking, co-presence, rasa theory), and queer radicalism.

This practically led module will explore the processes and practices of contemporary theatre making from a number of different perspectives, drawing on a range of international practitioners. The module will help you to locate your work in relation to the history of key theatre practitioners from the late-20th and early-21st centuries. You will engage with practices such as verbatim theatre, immersive or physical performance, along with the work of (e.g.) Forced Entertainment, Augusto Boal, or Jatinder Verma. In doing so, the module asks you to think about what ‘theatre’ is (form and context) in practice. That is, through practical exploration (in studios, in urban contexts, in homes or in online environments) the module explores how we create theatre and the importance of understanding theatre-making as an active practice and ongoing cultural, political and critical process in the world.

As a staff research led module, you will work in close collaboration with a client organisation to explore the role of the applied theatre practitioner. Concentrating on the needs of the chosen organisation and the aligned expertise of staff, you will learn skills and understandings appropriate to their audience and/or participant group. You will further develop your ability to plan, research, make and evaluate your performance work. This will involve interrogating a variety of performance styles and devising methodologies. This practice will be undertaken in dialogue with your tutors and with representatives of the client organisation, who will help you explore your relationship with the audience and the art form. You will be encouraged to investigate the relationship between the performer and the participant, the staged and the non-staged, and how theatre making functions in spaces other than conventional theatres. The module will familiarise you with the work of some key practitioners and movements within the applied field, enabling you to appreciate how your individual experience relates to the wider cultural arena.

Building on Arguments for Theatre and Performance, in this module you will develop skills in research methods that will be vital for your independent research in the final year. While still focused on the ‘grand challenges’ of the 21st century, you will be introduced to research methodologies and methods which might include areas such as practice research, documentary theatre, archival research, dialogical performance, performance analysis, interviews, ethnographic approaches, and walking performance. This module is designed as Dissertation preparation and, in that regard, it addresses issues relating to diverse approaches to the production of knowledge, but also provides students with practical and critical skills associated with particular methods of doing performance research.

This practically led module grounds your performance making within the creative, political, and cultural challenges of ‘the city’. Based on a tutor designed brief, you will be encouraged to test and challenge the limits of theatre and performance by investigating the role performances play in representing, reflecting upon and interrogating city cultures. The brief may include site-specific work in the NewcastleGateshead area, working with a play that explores city life, a box of objects that relate to urban contexts, or another creative stimulus for approaching a devising process. This creative process will be complemented with staff-led workshops on practices such as contemporary dance, directing challenging topics, creating scenographic atmospheres, site-responsive performance, performer-audience relations, or psychophysical acting. Building on your experiences at first year and in TP5002 Contemporary Theatre Making, you will continue to develop your practical devising skills as part of small group performances. You will have the opportunity to be creative, to experiment, and to put theory into practice to make performances located in venues such as theatre studios, museums, art galleries or with found places.

In this module you will learn how digital cultures are investigated through theatre and performance practices. The notion of ‘digital culture’ is explored in an expansive way to consider how ‘digital perspectives’ are represented in live performance works, along with providing tools for representation (projection, networks, etc.). This is inclusive of approaches to mixed reality, gaming theatre, and online performances along with plays that take ‘the internet’ as their subject (such as Tim Price’s Teh Internet is Serious Business and Jennifer Haley’s The Nether). As a research informed module, the interests and specialisms of the staff will guide the workshops included each year. The overall aim is to prepare you to identify, critique, and stage timely performances that investigate the social, aesthetic and political impacts of digital cultures (whether local or global) beyond a focus on the technology alone.

In this module you will be introduced to how select practitioners have approached the training of actors and performers. Informed by staff research interests, this module will develop your practical and theoretical understanding of how contemporary performers prepare for performance. This is inclusive of the techniques associated with (for example) Sandford Meisner, Jerzy Grotowski, Yoshi Oida, Freddie Hendricks, and Patsy Rodenburg. These techniques will be studied in workshop sessions and applied to scripted scenes. The module acts as an introduction to these performer training perspectives and offers the opportunity to expand your performance skillset, while also exploring your personal creative interests and identity. You will learn how to apply these techniques autonomously, making informed and interest driven choices on the types of material you will perform and which techniques you will use in your creative process.

Academic skills when studying away from your home country can differ due to cultural and language differences in teaching and assessment practices. This module is designed to support your transition in the use and practice of technical language and subject specific skills around assessments and teaching provision in your chosen subject. The overall aim of this module is to develop your abilities to read and study effectively for academic purposes; to develop your skills in analysing and using source material in seminars and academic writing and to develop your use and application of language and communications skills to a higher level.

The topics you will cover on the module include:

• Understanding assignment briefs and exam questions.
• Developing academic writing skills, including citation, paraphrasing, and summarising.
• Practising ‘critical reading’ and ‘critical writing’
• Planning and structuring academic assignments (e.g. essays, reports and presentations).
• Avoiding academic misconduct and gaining credit by using academic sources and referencing effectively.
• Listening skills for lectures.
• Speaking in seminar presentations.
• Presenting your ideas
• Giving discipline-related academic presentations, experiencing peer observation, and receiving formative feedback.
• Speed reading techniques.
• Developing self-reflection skills.