General OverviewThe BA (Hons) Performance course at UWS is designed to equip the student to become a creative maker, a critical thinker and work ready. Drawing on the expertise of the teaching team and visiting lectures, you will gain insights into the contemporary performance industries and develop a robust understanding of how performance is made, the cultural and social significance of performance and performance theory.
Our focus on practice, history, theory and industry allows you to explore performance critically and practically and gain a deeper understanding of diverse creative and research practices. You will be encouraged to develop your existing skills and passions whilst engaging with a series of new skills. Core and optional modules will provide a grounding in performance and performance making whilst supporting you to develop your own path and enabling you to position yourself within a variety of performance-related disciplines.
The course is for emerging performers, performance makers and those interested in developing their practical skills, researching their discipline and thinking critically about performance and culture.
Programme philosophy
Students are enabled to learn in discovery mode as co-producers of the curriculum. We also recognise that a graduate career is important to our students, so we design our programmes such that the first day in the academy for our students is also their first day in industry. In the context of the current development, our Performance provision is distinguished in terms of its cross- and interdisciplinary design, which provides students with a rich and stimulating range of opportunities to learn and produce collaboratively, mirroring the dynamics of real world professional settings. The programme is also underpinned by an epistemological commitment to integrated practice as praxis, rather than an artificial and creatively unsustainable separation of practical and theoretical activity.
The programme provides students with space to develop their practice holistically and in a context of expressive collaboration across and between disciplines. It will also equip graduates with the interpersonal and interdisciplinary capacity to deploy their creativity in pluralistic professional settings. The programmes should therefore appeal to the growing number of creative practitioners who want to define their practice in a research-infused context.
Articulation of academic themes
The development team agree that contemporary and effective Performance programmes should cover the following five academic themes:
- Theory
- History, culture and policy
- Research
- Practice skills
- Industry
The programme learning outcomes have been mapped against each of these five themes to ensure that students can objectively demonstrate their achievement in each area . At the same time, however, the programme philosophy rests on an appreciation of practice as a research-infused deployment of technique as a creative and contextual response. As such, the programme learning outcomes are designed to enable students to bring these academic themes together in their practice.
The above caveats notwithstanding, the programme learning outcomes architecture is presented such that the first learning outcome for each characteristic relates to history, culture and policy; the second relates to theory; the third to research; the fourth to practice skills; and the fifth to industry.
Realisation of graduate attributes
Graduates from contemporary Performance programmes need to be equipped for freelance careers, able to think critically, and be confident and effective in their practice. As such, the team identified the following three themes as likely to resonate more meaningfully to students in the creative and creative industries:
- Critical thinkers
- Freelance Ready
- Creative Makers
Student Journey
Full-time students will undertake the modules in the order they appear in the relevant programme schema. UWS encourages reassessment at the earliest opportunity, so flexibility will be utilised around reassessment to optimise student progression.
Part-time students will agree their learning journey with the programme team, particularly through guidance from their Personal Tutor and, as required, the School’s Education Guidance Adviser. Care will be taken to limit the student workload to 60 credits per academic year, so all other things being equal, the normal part-time journey will be as follows:
Students will undertake long 40-credit Performance Production modules at levels 7 and 8, through which they will develop and showcase their practice. These modules are spread over both trimesters so that students’ practice will be informed by the full range of learning they participate in across the year. At levels 9 and 10 their performance production becomes specialised and allows the student to focus on areas of speciality through the Creative Festival, a series of options and finally a large scale performance project incestigating new performance realisation.
They also undertake 20-credit Performance Contexts modules at Levels 7, 8 and 9, through which they will expand their preparedness for success in the creative and cultural industries. And they undertake theoretically-based modules at these levels, via the Performance Theory 1 and 2, and Contemporary Debates in Art & Performance.
The historical theme is addressed directly via Performance History , Culture & Society, and the research strand begins at Level 9 through Art & Performance Research Methods.
These modules therefore develop student adeptness across the five academic themes of the programme, which students integrate through their maturing practice. The students then bring these skills, experiences and attributes together at Level 10 through the long 60-credit Creative Research Project module, the 40-credit New Performance Realisationt module focused on the contemporary creative landscape, and the Performance: Networks andPromotion module focused on work-readiness.
Students who enrol at level 9 will be given the opportunity to join additional level 8 modules in Culture and Society and Performance Theory where a gap in their knowledge is identified.
Postgraduate progression routes
UWS has a corporate commitment to encouraging our students to progress to postgraduate study within the institution. So, in addition to the varied specialist Masters degrees offered elsewhere, students who graduate from BA (Hons) Performance will be encouraged to progress onto our MA Creative Media Practice programme. This is an interdisciplinary programme that provides space for practitioners to explore and consolidate their creative identity across digital content, media, moving and still image, audio, writing and performance. Delivered by expert practitioners, the programme expands on undergraduate experience to further equip students for a career in the creative industries, offering network contacts, the chance to build a portfolio, and essential practical skills.
Employment routes
The programme design enables students to achieve both the I AM UWS Graduate Attributes, and at the same time recognise their achievement as Freelance Ready, Critical Thinkers, and Creative Makers. Students will graduate with a portfolio of leading-edge creative outputs, a deep appreciation of the industry context of their practice, and a clear understanding of the requirements of a freelance career.
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