Contemporary and Popular Performance BA (Hons)

Level 4 introduces and develops the academic and intellectual skills that you will need for study and professional development. In addition, you will begin to learn the practical and technical skills of the performer and creator, producer and change-maker.

You will contextualise these in a developing understanding of contemporary, popular and socially engaged performance and theatre. On completion of level 4, you will be able to:

• Demonstrate a range of technical skills including Voice, Cabaret and Circus Skills, Movement, Production and Design.
• Integrate these various skills and techniques into solo and group performances.
• Apply historical and contextual research to performance in a manner which extends its reach.
• Articulate informed ideas and concepts, about the producing of new popular performance, in seminar discussion and in writing.
• Deploy the basics of practice-based research in artistic and analytic ways.

Level 5 develops your skills towards a level appropriate to preprofessional work and gives experience of outside professional and community contexts, including via work placement, group facilitation and guest lecture series.

On completion of level 5 you will be able to:

• Negotiate organisational and logistical planning for making and producing both group devised performances and Practice as Research performative lectures.
• Articulate your artistic and intellectual ideas on contemporary, popular and social change performances, genres and movements in both written and practical modes.
• Present your theoretical ideas confidently using appropriate performance methodologies.
• Manage projects on-campus at Rose Bruford, at Tramshed and beyond college sites.

You are expected to be a self-directed learner at year 3. Module study options include, but are not limited to:

Creating Contemporary and Popular Performance (Skill, Devising and Context) III

This module runs throughout the whole year across two semesters and enables you to hone your skills and knowledge gained from Creating Contemporary and Popular Performance I and II through creating a significant piece of performance work, supporting marketing and documentation materials, a fully realised and researched pitch for your own event and a critical reflection in writing. Working across the genres of physical theatre, live art and popular performance forms, it combines and reframes these techniques with devising approaches through feminist, decolonised and ecological perspectives of live art practices, with traditional and non-traditional training techniques, devices and exercises re-visioned for the current day.

Activating Change III

This module runs the full year and consolidates your practical and theoretical research skills and enables you to investigate, in detail, a specific aspect of Theatre & Social Change and Popular and Contemporary Performance which is of particular interest to you. The module represents the culmination of your critical reflection on performance practices, as well as models and movements for social change, and gives you the opportunity to undertake a sustained piece of independent research work.

Producing Change V: Extended Work Placements

This six-month work placement will give you the tools you need to experience being part of an organisation, to see a season or extended period at a workspace, and to build a project for that organisation, thus becoming leaders and innovators inside of theatre & social change. The module (and the degree) concludes with a Social Change and Popular Performance Showcase, an opportunity for you to share these projects with professionals in the field.

• In your first year, you will complete around 380 hours of indicative scheduled learning and teaching activities and 80 hours of independent learning on projects, productions, placements or self-directed study. Assessment will be through Performances; Coursework, presentations and portfolios; Continuous practical assessment; essay.
• In your second year, you will complete around 380 hours of indicative scheduled learning and teaching activities and 80 hours of independent learning on projects, productions, placements or self-directed study. Assessment will be through Performances; Coursework, presentations and portfolios; Continuous practical assessment.
• In your third year, you will complete around 380 hours of indicative scheduled learning and teaching activities and 80 hours of independent learning on projects, productions, placements or self-directed study. Assessment will be through Performances; Coursework, presentations and portfolios; Continuous practical assessment; written thesis.

Contemporary and Popular Performance Programme Specification