Over the space of three years, students will have the opportunity to discover and explore the world of live performance through the following core areas: Ideation Studies, Contextual Studies, Discipline Studies, Project Studies and Reflection Studies.
Ideation Studies
Not only will students work collaboratively to creatively engage with and understand the rich diversities of theories surrounding live performance, they will also learn how these contribute to building engaging characters. During this learning process, students will develop the concepts and perceptual capacity necessary to develop their own original, exciting character interpretations.
They will do so with an understanding of narrative, how story is informed by conflict and its relationship to the human condition, as well as by exploring and comprehending how story is visualized and expressed through performance, medium, aesthetics and the business of film, TV, stage and emerging media.
Discipline Studies
Students will have the opportunity to use the knowledge they have gleaned to experiment, improvise and express their creative voice in the disciplines of stage acting, screen acting and musical performance, as well as a choice of various motion picture disciplines. These discipline concentrations, and the perceptual and concrete skills they inform, have been conceptualized in such a way that they meet the ever-evolving production needs of the 21st century performance industry.
Contextual Studies
Key 21st century skills are covered, such as critical thinking, collaboration, career development and resilience, goal-setting and values, together with an understanding that the landscape of digital technologies for the creative economy is ever-changing. Not only will these skills provide students with a wider scope for future employment, they will also encourage the development of creative individuals who are culturally aware, who have the capacity to exercise ethical considerations, and who are able to successfully integrate their abilities with others in a team.
Project Studies
Students are given the opportunity to systematically apply the concepts and theories explored in Ideation, Discipline and Contextual Studies to producing a term project. For these projects, different learning narratives are assigned to groups of students sequentially, providing them with the opportunity to experiment and engage with a broad range of performance media. This project-led approach to learning allows students to develop a meaningful and productive relationship with the acquisition of new knowledge.
Reflection Studies
The production process culminates in Reflection Studies, allowing students to critically reflect on their experiential project-led learning. Here, students are encouraged to link their theoretical learning and application of their disciplines to their experiences of the real world, mapping their growth and deciding how what they have learned during the creation of their projects will inform their career development, their investment in the world, and their own personal fulfilment.
Tutorials
Students will attend regular small-group tutorials, which forms an integral part of their learning process. In these tutorials, students will have the opportunity to enhance their knowledge of lecture content, and to critically engage with concepts and projects with the help and guidance of experienced tutors and lecturers – individuals with the skills, understanding and empathy to offer necessary individual support. Tutorials are structured to encourage the sharing of individual creative ideas as a means to a successful collaborative outcome.
Discipline Electives
During the first eighteen months of the program, there are no electives and all students are required to do all three Live Performance discipline concentrations and choose any two Motion Picture Medium discipline concentrations. All other subjects are core subjects. During the last eighteen months of the program, students choose one discipline concentration from the two in which they specialised in the second semester of Second Year, majoring in one discipline and minoring in another.
