BA (Hons) Performing Arts

Course details

Taught by highly experienced, internationally active staff, this actor training course places a strong accent on adventure and innovation. This course aims to produce performing arts pioneers, ready to reinvent form, uncover new content and win new audiences. Graduates should find themselves well equipped to carve out career paths in the performing arts and related fields.

Why choose this course?

The course will provide you with a highly stimulating, vocationally centred programme of intensive performer training situated within the academic rigour of a university renowned for its teaching-led practice.

A primary feature of the course is its ever-expanding links with the industry. These links are fostered through the extensive use of industry specialists as visiting tutors in students’ curricular training, and also through the prolific work of the departmental theatre company – Full Tilt Theatre Company. This company tours and performs at national and international levels and has enjoyed critical success at venues from the Minack theatre in Cornwall to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Please visit www.fulltilt-theatre.com for more details.

About the course

The actor training at Bath Spa University has a very distinctive flavour that shapes our students as imaginative, creative, pro-active ‘knowing’ performers. Taught by a highly experienced, internationally active body of academic staff and practitioners, the course places a strong accent on adventure and innovation. The course is practice-based with a strong critical/ theoretical component aimed at fostering a self awareness in the wider context of artistic production.

In Year 1 you will be introduced to the ‘art of playing’ as an overarching framework for gaining and practising performance skills and for understanding performance in modules such as Performance Workshops. You will compose and perform work throughout your first year in modules such as Acting 1.

Year 2 concentrates on extending the idea of ensemble in the work. You will focus on production and performance, developing your understanding through practical and theoretical research and dramaturgy, producing more challenging work in the module Production and Performance.

The third year is devoted to experiential training in theatre and focuses on your professionalisation. In the Module Into Industry You’ll recieve a masterclass series, putting you in contact with industry specialists, (casting directors, producers, agents) which focus on developing your industry awareness. In tandem with these classes you will investigate classical theatre and its relationship with the contemporary. In doing so, you’ll develop your voice as an emerging performer. The training culminates in a thesis production in which you will drive the creative process, creating work which then acts as a graduating showcase. Thesis productions have previously toured locally, nationally and internationally.

All students on the course follow a common first two years of study. In the third year you can choose

one of two informal pathways. These are:

· Theatre Acting

· Performance for the Recorded Media.