Contemporary Performing Practices

Overview

This practice-as-research module will provide insight into contemporary performing practices through approaches to movement and text that foreground experimental, improvisatory, body-based work. Students will be encouraged to develop a broader sense of performance in terms of physical and vocal sculpture and non-naturalistic use of performance phenomena. Workshops will introduce students to exercises developed from contemporary performance methodologies (e.g. Bogart and Landau’s Viewpoints), and will also include guest workshops with professional theatre and dance practitioners working in Belfast. The workshops will prepare students for the creation of their own, studio-based, group performance.
This module examines contemporary performing practices from both a practical and theoretical perspective. In seminars, students will engage in a consideration of bodily realities (corporealities) through the lens of performance practices such as physical theatre, contemporary dance, and performance art. The module provides students with the opportunity to interweave philosophical and practical research through an interrogation of theories of subjectivity/identity and embodiment in relation to the moving body in performance.

Learning Objectives

On completion of this module students should have developed:
- an experiential and theoretical awareness of some contemporary performing techniques
- an awareness of some key theatre and movement practitioners and their methodologies for performer training
- the ability to present practice research in the form of performance, and both oral and written presentation
- the ability to work creatively and imaginatively in a group

Skills

- an awareness of the creative skills necessary for the realisation of studio-based work that interweaves research and practice
- skills of observation and the ability to critically evaluate their own and others’ practice
- visual, aural and spatial awareness

Assessment