Acting and Performance

Core modules

Performance Practitioners and Techniques

This theoretical module explores the historical development of acting techniques and practitioners, contextualising their impact on the performing arts, and exploring in detail their differences and similarities.

The Actor’s Body and Voice

This module focuses on different techniques and practitioners that will enable you to free, release and develop your physical and vocal apparatus.

Discovering Acting

This module begins the process of honing your acting skills to a professional level. It’s your opportunity to focus on advanced acting techniques using a range of popular and contemporary practitioners.

Performance Histories

This module helps you to understand where acting and theatre have come from. Focussing specifically on the Western tradition, it explores the history of live performance from early ritual through to the 21st century, considering how audiences, performers, theatre spaces and play-texts have changed and developed over time.

Directed Production

This module takes the acting skills and techniques that you have learnt during your First Year and puts them to work through a production process which involves you working with a director and other actors.

Screen Practice and Performance

This module introduces you to a range of screen acting genres and styles whilst developing your awareness and application of the technical challenges associated with working on camera.

Core modules

Performance and Identity

You will discover how and why issues of identity are important to the actor and performance maker. You will acquire a basic knowledge of a range of theories relating to cultural identity.

Acting and Performance – Live Brief

You will be making and performing work for specific audiences in specific community environments, in response to a brief which will be set by a professional from outside the University. In this way, you will explore how important it is for performance to be socially engaged.

Screen Acting

You will learn the importance of active listening and responding (rather than hearing and acting) when working on screen, developing your awareness of the need for a heightened inner stimulus.

Contemporary Theatre

You will learn how digital technologies and social networking have changed the concept of performance – the computer is now the largest virtual stage in the world, watched through the proscenium arch of the screen.

Theatre Production

This module offers you the opportunity to apply and demonstrate, in an intense scripted stage production project, the skills and techniques that you have acquired so far on the course.

Monologues

This module continues the work began in Discovering Acting in the first year. We pick up the work on a range of acting techniques and deepen your experience and practice elevating your acting to new heights.

Core modules

Final Major Project – Acting and Performance

This module runs throughout Level 6, and is the culmination of your degree, since you are given the opportunity to develop, rehearse and present a performance which showcases everything that you have learnt.

Research Project

Here you are given the opportunity to delve into an area that excites and stimulates you. By making your choice of what to research, you will form a deep knowledge, understanding and appreciation of an area that could support your career pathway into the performing arts, building valuable networks and contacts within the industry.

Screen Projects

You will be given the opportunity to put into practice the acting techniques and skills acquired throughout your degree in a screen performance written and directed by a tutor or outside professional.

Actors Portfolio

Graduation is just around the corner, and now is the time to prepare for your future! This module will help you develop the skills, tools and information needed to launch your career in the creative industries.

Optional modules

Please note: Not all optional modules are guaranteed to run each year.

Performing Arts in Education

For anyone interested in performing arts teaching as a career, or in developing skills in leading workshops which you can add to your performance CV, this is the optional module for you.

Directing Performers

You will be given the opportunity to direct a scene from a play script/musical theatre libretto and present it to an invited audience. This module will give you an insight into the task required of the professional theatre director – working with actors, working with scripts and organising people and time.

Music Theatre

An exploration into Total Theatre, building on the inspiring work of Joan Littlewood through to cutting edge contemporary theatre companies such as Punchdrunk, Kneehigh and Shared Experience, Music Theatre has found its place in leading-edge theatre making.

Stage Combat

With the growth in the gaming industry and popularity of action films and television series, it is now more important than ever for a versatile actor to be able to carry out a choreographed combat sequence with confidence and safety. This optional module will prepare you for such demands.