The work of Performance Arts is international in its focus, recognising the importance of understanding and learning through the exchange of ideas, cultures and experience. It is both a collaborative, and uniquely personal experience. In the first two years of the programme you will be in a highly guided programme, before then spending the third year deciding for yourself your area of focus, writing your own projects and showing the outcomes of your work.
Although you constantly learn through the body in practical and academic contexts, the course does not offer a practical training for actors. Instead it offers the producers and makers of performance, an opportunity to develop performance skills, which are put into practice for the duration of the programme and beyond. Practical workshops and projects may be completed in areas as diverse as Butoh, puppetry, object manipulation, dramaturgy, scenography, photography, site-specific, carnival, street arts, video/film, fashion and opera, among many others, with leading practitioners from across the world. As such, Performance Arts acts as a hub of ideas and opportunities which students may then choose to explore further through their individual study plans and projects.
Students will be constantly asked to debate, argue, and push ideas forward within their area of interest and find what this means for them personally as they develop their practice.
The programme develops creative leadership, authorship and ownership of your work. You will develop your skills within enterprise and entrepreneurial creative practice.
As a student of Performance Arts you may also investigate how performance can shape culture and form identity, and have the opportunity to develop preliminary skills across the creative and contextual disciplines of performance practice and interdisciplinary studies (including writing for performance; interactivity; producing and entrepreneurship; and performance theory), as well as an understanding of the uses of scenography and dramaturgy.
While the course is focused on the development of your individual creative identity, you will work in a highly collaborative environment and be expected to undertake a range of roles, challenging your own process. Therefore, the programme is well suited to the future leaders of performance venues, organisations and companies.
Those interested in directing, producing, devising, creative writing, live and performance art, arts administration and dramaturgy will find this course useful, but they will also be asked throughout their time with us to look beyond what they expect, know and value.
In Year One you will have the chance to learn dramaturgical skills, you will write a new piece of work, develop visual principles of scenography and composition of space, text analysis, practical basics of lighting and sound, methods of devised performance, ethnography, a critical and theoretical framework for understanding new performance practice, how to apply research methods and reflective practice, and processes of documentation and criticism. The year concludes with a student devised site-specific performance somewhere in the world.
In Year Two you will undertake short projects designed to increase awareness of intercultural and interdisciplinary skills with practitioners from the international community such as Gbolahan Obisesan, Marisa Carnesky, Manuel Vason, James Dacre, Michael Walling, Ernst Fischer, Trish Lyons, Rajni Shah, Juschka Weigel, Won Kim, and Para-Active. You will produce a festival of live performance, The Accidental Festival (http://www.accidentalfestival.co.uk), at a professional venue in London, such as the Roundhouse, and complete a professional placement with a company or practitioner of your own selection. You may also continue to develop your skills within visual dramaturgy.
In Year Three you will have the opportunity to put specialist skills into practice as a creative practitioner through three major tasks designed by you with guidance from tutors. You will also prepare a portfolio, which might include archives of performances you have been involved in during the year. The third year of study is highly independent and you will be required to support your learning in a vocational setting beyond Central.
Placements
You will be involved with collaborative projects with both London-based and international arts organisations, for example the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Roundhouse, English National Opera, Kinetika, dreamthinkspeak, Goat & Monkey, and Punchdrunk. Students have also taken their work to Los Angeles, New York, Prague, Montenegro, Slovakia, Denmark, Estonia, Brazil, Russia and Scotland.
