Theatre & Performance BA(Hons)

You’ll develop essential foundational skills and approaches for voice, body, movement and imaginative practices. You will also develop your knowledge and skills in relation to digital and immersive technologies and explore their potential in making live performances more engaging for modern audiences. We’ll also investigate global issues, historical contexts and modern practice and ideas. You'll explore a range of texts and how to approach them, as well as developing an ensemble performance of original live work. 

Teaching and learning will also focus on mental and physical wellbeing, stress-management, time management, personal resilience and sustainability – all crucial for a career in the performing arts.  

Modules

Performance Skills

Develop fundamental voice and movement technique training for the performer. Get to know your voice and body and its extraordinary potential.  

Culture & Contexts: Stage and Screen 

Develop research, critical thinking and writing skills: examine the roots and cultural contexts of theatre-making, performance, film and television, and their relationship to each other.  

Play Texts

Explore fundamental practical physical, vocal, psychological and creative approaches to text for the performer. Develop, rehearse and perform a variety of scene studies.  

Making Skills 1

Learn and develop practical physical, vocal, creative and collaborative tools and how to apply them to make engaging and exciting theatre.  

Stagecraft: Physical and Digital Scenography 

Experiment with analogue and digital aspects of stagecraft, scenography and performance making, whilst developing your sensory imagination and design thinking skills. Collaborate to bring together a range of these practical skills to drive a creative process.   

Ensemble Performance

In small companies, collaborate to create and perform your own original piece of performance as an ensemble. Explore choral working, physical theatre and other approaches. 

Modules

Extended Making Skills: Physical, Vocal, Digital 

Continue to build, deepen and integrate your physical theatre, vocal and digital-making skills. You will explore their performance application through workshop exercises and self-led practice. 

Immersive and Participatory Theatre 

Working within a company, you’ll develop, rehearse and perform a public production with a director, exploring immersive and participatory theatre forms and collaborating with other specialists.  

Theatre Futures 

Explore the work of significant contemporary theatre companies, producers and festivals. 

Examine the wider cultural, social and political contexts of creating and sharing work. Contextualise your developing practice in relation to the contemporary landscape of theatre and performance. 

Page to Stage: Writing, Directing and Dramaturgy 

Develop and extend writing skills in and around the making and performing of material and acquire, develop and apply a range of directing and dramaturgical skills. 

Show in a Bag 

Lead the creation of your own piece of solo performance work, using a range of generative processes, techniques and skills, exploring a range of delivery styles. You will be encouraged to take the eventual work you make out into venues and communities as a public performance.  

Modes of Making: Socially Engaged Practice 

Through advanced physical, vocal and imagination training, you will encounter a series of technique-specific workshops to help extend your understanding of socially engaged performance practice. You will also be introduced to diverse approaches to collaborative theatre-making focussed on a social context.  

In companies, you will create an original live performance informed and supported by techniques and methodologies encountered in the workshops. 

You can choose to take an optional placement year after your second year on a three-year programme, or after your third year if you’re studying for a degree with an Integrated Foundation Year. 

You’ll be responsible for finding your own placement, with support from the Employability team. 

Choosing this option will enhance your industry experience and skills while studying. 

How you’ll study during your professional placement 

You’ll spend time working in a professional context, as part of a business or organisation. This can be in one role, or up to three, and must be for a minimum of 24 weeks. 

You’ll develop in-demand workplace skills, deepen your insight into industry and grow your network of contacts, all of which could help you get ahead in your career after graduation. 

Throughout this year, you’ll develop a portfolio of work that includes critical self-reflection on what has been learned from the experience. You’ll be required to evidence your experiences, the skills you’ve learned and your professional growth. 

In your final year, you will extend and deepen your techniques and making skills, as well as your personal, social and philosophical approach to theatre. You will work towards becoming a proactive, independent and entrepreneurial practitioner, who is resilient, able to transfer your skills to other disciplines and able to manage a sustainable career. 

Using your critical and reflective skills, you’ll research and write a paper on an area of theatre making that inspires and interests you. You’ll also develop performance material – individually and in companies – honing creative process skills through delivering scratch work (‘test’ performances) in several different contexts.  

You will finish the year developing and performing your own professional work for public production to industry specialists and audiences. You’ll also take on a professional development project, where you’ll prepare for the industry by learning about how its infrastructure functions, and how to develop a career as a performer, theatre maker or company. You will create a professional identity for yourself ready to share on a range of platforms and networks. 

Modules

Creating Companies

Create and develop scratch performance work over several dynamic cycles in small companies. Pitch ideas for work to producers, then collaborate in companies to make that work over a defined period of time.    

Professional Development 

You’ll learn about the practical ‘nuts and bolts’ infrastructure of the theatre and performance business, and how to develop a career as a performer, theatre maker or company.  

You will also explore allied industries and contexts where your creative skills and solution-centred entrepreneurial approach are in high demand.  

The Thinking Practitioner: Student Led Research 

Research, critically reflect upon and write about an area of theatre making that passionately interests you.  

Masterclasses: Physical, Vocal & Digital 

Through advanced masterclasses you will finesse your creative theatre making creative skills. Voice, physicality, composition and dramaturgical skills will be focuses, as well as digital skills and technologies to feed into your professional practice. 

Professional Production 

Work in a small production company and collaborate to develop, rehearse, polish and present your own original professional production for performance to industry specialists and the public. Alongside this, you will develop the knowledge and skills to potentially fund and resource your work in the future.  

Blending theory and practice, you’ll learn through practical workshops and masterclasses, supported by lectures and seminars. There’ll also be opportunities to work with local, national and international companies and practitioners. 

At Falmouth, we use a 'digitally enhanced learning & teaching' approach. Your experience will always be predominantly in-person, including seminars, tutorials and studio teaching, with some, more targeted elements, being online either live (synchronous) or pre-recorded (asynchronous). You can read more here. 

The Theatre & Performance course assessment approach reflects and enables an incremental, developmental learning experience.  

The assessment for the Award consists of 100% coursework, including: 

• Practical Assessment (group, individual) – which includes in-class presentations, discussions, demonstrations/process showings, studio-based practice, productions, and final year performances. 
• Written and reflective assessment – including essays, research writings, digital/physical portfolios, critical reviews and live discussions. 

Regular giving and receiving of feedback during practical work enables effective individual and group critique and reflection.  

A range of disciplined practical activities (workshops, demonstrations, seminars, lectures, tutorial supervision) are used to develop skills and abilities and demonstrate outcomes including workshops and lectures with professional performers, companies and directors.  

These opportunities will help develop independently minded practitioners and are designed to help you prepare for the range of activities you will engage in as graduates: to be able to demonstrate expertise in negotiation and pursuing shared goals; handling creative, personal and interpersonal issues; and communicating through a variety of media and platforms.