BA (Hons) Performance: Design and Practice

Course detail

This course is focused on your individual creative potential and critical intelligence. You explore performance creation through design and making. The curriculum content responds to the practice of others, emerging contexts for practice, and diverse perspectives of both audience and maker.

The course presents performance, in its broadest sense, as a dynamic and continuously shifting subject domain. It encourages and facilitates visual practices and processes that challenge the existing conceptions and boundaries of the discipline. You develop as a curious, critically reflective and proactive learner with a unique cultural identity. The course provides a supportive and inclusive environment for the acquisition of skills and knowledge leading you into professional practice and postgraduate study.

Distinctive features from the course programme specification:

• The embodied engagement with design and its relationship to the performance making process is a unique approach and key concept of the course. This approach fosters ‘performance: design and making’, in eclectic, interdisciplinary contexts of contemporary arts including festivals, installations, theatre, and film, challenging traditional territories, processes and assumptions. We value performance-making strategies where the maker’s relationships with audience, space, time, movement, event and duration are parallel concerns
• A unique position in a specialist arts and design college and university maintain the traditions of the Art School, where collaborations, activities and initiatives take place with other courses and students and that place value on innovation, restlessness, criticality, uncertainty, academic rigor together with the highly developed skills of professional practice. As such the course is in a unique area between Theatre and Fine Art, Fashion Spatial Practices and Design – all subjects within the college
• Our central London location offers opportunities to take advantage of high quality partnerships and collaborations with industry, for example: The London Sinfonietta, London Studio Centre, the RCA, the National Trust and the V&A. Opportunities for engaging with diverse audiences through collaborations with, for example, Cardboard Citizens Theatre, Duckie, Live Art Development Agency, English Pocket Opera, and The Royal Albert Hall, O’Neill Ross, Trinity Laban and Punchdrunk, all of which provide opportunities for alternative and site based performance and design.
• We are proud of the range and standing of the professional practitioners that are our students come into contact with throughout their time on the course. Geraldine Pilgrim, Tim Yip, Colleen Attwood, Jacqueline Durran, Gareth Evans (Whitechapel Gallery), Free Theatre of Belarus, Peta Lily, Nitin Sawney and Uchemma Dance, Chrysalis Dance
• The course is practice based and this is reflected in the breadth of ambitious work that has concerns for the societal, ethical and sustainable contemporary performance making agendas. The course actively engages with and has an effect upon diverse audiences and communities.
• Performance: Design and Practice attracts an international cohort with diverse skill sets who bring and share their knowledge of diverse traditional and emerging cultural performance practices
• The integration and application of contextual and critical studies with practice gives our students an argument for not only what they are doing but also the process through which work is created. This is developed through understanding performance as research practice. Delivered through lectures and seminars, the wide range of topics and material consider the principles and history of design for performance. Key practitioners and movements, specific to performance and theatre and from a wider context. These broadly are Semiotics, Phenomenology, Post structuralism & Deconstruction, Psychoanalytic theory, Feminist and Gender Studies, Reception theory, Materialist theory, Postmodern and Post-colonial theory
• The course is practice based and this is reflected in the breadth of ambitious work that has concerns for the societal, ethical and sustainable contemporary performance making agendas. The course actively engages with and has an effect upon diverse audiences and communities. The course offers opportunities for students to develop a broad portfolio or focus their practice on for example design for dance, costume in film
• We forefront the dialogic and collaborative skills of performance making combined with the innovative thinking, presentation and design skills that are needed in new creative cultural economies
• Working in collaboration with students to shape their learning increases individual responsibility for learning, professional identity and direction. As the students develop their own practice we provide the opportunity for them to choose emphasis and orientation in the final year. Sites and spaces at KX and the black and white performance laboratories at CSM are fundamental spaces for developing and presenting practice and for experimentation and testing of ideas.

Autumn term:
Monday 24 September 2018 – Friday 7 December 2018
Spring term:
Monday 7 January 2019 – Friday 15 March 2019
Summer term:
Monday 15 April 2019 – Friday 21 June 2019

• Design for Opera 2015
• 2016 Degree Show website
• 2017 Degree Show website

Course outline

The course runs for 90 weeks full time over three years, and is divided into three Levels (or Stages), each lasting 30 weeks. The whole course is credit-rated at 360 credits, with 120 credits at each Level (Stage).

Under the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications the Levels for a BA are: Level 4 (which is Stage 1 of the course), Level 5 (Stage 2) and Level 6 (Stage 3).

There’s a progression point at the end of each Level and, in order to progress, all units of the preceding Level must normally have been passed.

There’s a progression point at the end of each Level and, in order to progress, all units of the preceding Level must normally have been passed.

If you’re unable to continue on the course a Certificate of Higher Education (Cert HE) will normally be offered following the successful completion of Level 4, or a Diploma in Higher Education following the successful completion of Level 5.

To gain a BA (Honours), students must successfully complete 360 credits. The final award consists of marks from Level 6 units only, weighted according to their credits.

Outline of the course

The course is three years full time and is organised in three stages, which correspond to each year of study. There are nine assessed Units over the three years. The curriculum is designed to provide opportunities to develop cross disciplinary knowledge and skills appropriate to your emerging focus and interest. Your studies in performance includes critical studies, personal and professional development and, in Stage two, elements of choice that will give you experience beyond the course. The course is centred on experiential practice and reflection that informs your choices through the course and in the future.

The course aims to create a common contextual and critical framework across all Stages of the course through screenings, guest lectures, related reading and external events – a shared language.

Stage one introduces a variety of skills, relating to curriculum activity and a range of student needs. These skills workshops are progressive and are prioritised to different Units. In Stage two students choose from options of projects which in Stage three form Communities of Practice with shared interests.

There’s a progression point at the end of each Level and, in order to progress, all units of the preceding Level must normally have been passed.

Unit one: "Performance: Design & Practice: Introduction to Study in Higher Education" (20 credits)

Unit two: "Right Here Right Now (20 credits)"

Unit three: "Critical Practice 1: drawing colour making" (40 credits)

Unit four: "Performance: Frames and Territories" (40 credits)

The emphasis in Stage 1 is on introducing perspectives on the creation of performance through explorations of source material, space, time, and the audience-performer relationship. You’ll be introduced to practical, collaborative reading and writing skills so that you can start building an informed personal approach to creating performance.

Stage two

Unit five: "Further Adventures in Performance: Making Stuff Happen" (40 credits)

Unit six: "Critical Practice 2: Platforms and Communities" (40 credits)

Unit seven": Performance design in the expanded field "(40 credits)

Stage two is a year of transition. You’ll make progress towards developing an individual creative identity, methods for working, and identifying the areas of particular interest that will inform your choices in Stage 3. The practical and personal skills you need to communicate your ideas effectively are refined through intensive practical projects. Towards the end of the year your critical practice is focussed towards planning and preparing for your major piece of written work in Stage Three.

"A Diploma in Professional Studies" is offered between Stage 2 and 3 of the BA (Honours) course. This separate qualification (120 credits) involves researching, undertaking and reflecting on a 20-week placement related to your professional interests and aspirations (e.g. within organisations such as theatre or film companies, on specific events, or as an assistant to a designer or producer). The Diploma provides a valuable opportunity to make professional contacts and to develop your personal employability skills.

Stage three

Unit eight: "Critical Studies" (40 credits)

Unit nine: "Design and Performance" (80 credits)

Stage 3 reflects as far as possible the challenges you’re likely to meet in professional practice or during further study at Masters level. Stage 3 units are designed to help you apply, expand and deepen the skills and understanding gained in Stages 1 and 2. Project work focuses on your development with your creative perspective enabling you to move between activities and contexts, or to pursue a specialist research or practical direction. While Unit 8 is a substantial piece of written work in the form of a word and images document both units offer flexibility, both to facilitate your personal perspective and to help you choose the best way to demonstrate your abilities. Your marks for these two units determine the classification of your degree.

Critical studies embedded within all units and stages consist of explorations of past and contemporary culture through assigned tasks, debate, lectures, presentations and workshops.

Personal and professional development and creative attributes for employability are also embedded into the Units with practice and critical studies, helps you focus on generic study skills and orientation, becoming more closely related to your chosen professional direction.

BA Performance Design and Practice Programme Specification 2018/19 (PDF, 422KB)

Facilities

• Studio Theatre

  Find out more about our studio theatre space

• CAD

  Find out more about our CAD workshop

• Costume

  Find out more about our costume workshop at King's Cross

Staff

Course Leader: Fred Meller
Lecturer: Peter Bond
Lecturer: Pete Brooks
Lecturer: Dermot Hayes
Lecturer: Fred Meller
Lecturer: Drew Pautz
Lecturer: Michael Spencer
Lecturer: Jake Strickland
Lecturer: Dr Andrea Zimmerman
Costume Technician: Jenny Hayton
Stage Technician: Steve Keay