Stage Acting provides an experiential foundation in practical voice, speech and body skills primarily targeted at the actor and the application of these to the interpretation of a range of written texts. Students will be introduced to acting skills that will enable them to perform play texts from the 16th-21st centuries. The method of training will focus on a range of techniques developed by performance practitioners relating to Shakespeare, naturalism, absurdism and in-yer-face theatre practices. This unit aims to offer the opportunity for developing critical and professional awareness of issues and practices in the field of theatre and performance. Students will learn a full vocal and physical warm-up that can be adapted to a variety of different professional performance needs and contexts. They will work with Kristin Linklater and Patsy Rodenburg’s methodologies to prepare Shakespeare scenes, and collaborate with MA Theatre Directing students to learn Katie Mitchell’s approach to staging and embodying naturalism. By the end of the course, students will be offered the opportunity to further hone their skills by devising their own workshops for acting approaches to twentieth-century playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and Sarah Kane.
I'm delighted to be teaching DT2201 Staging the Real this year and look forward to working with you. As you know, this course focuses on documentary and verbatim theatre and raises questions about the histories, ethics, pleasures, possibilities, and limitations of 'staging the real'. We'll be reading plays, watching performances, discussing our responses, scrutinising scholarly writings, and making theatre pieces. As an academic, I have published on this topic and you may find it helpful to have a look at the book I co-edited with Alison Forysth - 'Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present' (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), listed in the course bibliography - which is the first book to critically analyse the global resurgence of documentary theatre in the twenty-first century. I hope, like me, you will become fascinated by this topic!
In the first half of the course, we will explore a range of contemporary approaches to the staging of documentary theatre material around the world; we will also develop an appreciation of the theoretical implications and historical traditions of ‘staging the real’. In the second half of term, the focus will be on preparing the assessed group performances, and discussions on the essays. Throughout the term, we will explore verbatim theatre both critically (through discussion, presentations, and essay writing), and creatively (though practical work and performance).
Please keep in touch and let me know if have any thoughts, ideas, or questions - I'd love to hear them! And I hope you enjoy the course!
Chris Megson
Conflict and care inform everyday life, from family relationships to war veterans’ rehabilitation. In this module you will develop an understanding of the relationship between applied theatre and conflict transformation. We will engage with a variety of creative approaches exploring war and conflict-ridden events and experiences on a global scale in order to examine the interplay between conflict, care and applied theatre practice. By discussing how practitioners respond and adapt their practices to various global contexts you will develop nuanced considerations of social justice, accountably and the ethics of care, and gain skills to examine the cultural, political and social dimensions of socially engaged art and applied theatre practice.
Welcome all
I'm looking forward very much to teaching you all on this new Black Lives Matter course. Debates about race, racism, Black Lives Matter, and the legacies of history are at the forefront of public discourse right now. This course is designed to introduce you to how Black Lives Matter concerns are represented in a range of theatre, film and television programmes. I've focused the course on four themes: the police, immigration and asylum, histories of enslavement and Black queer and trans lives and the idea is that you will get a taster of different themes and genres, which you can develop for your own research projects.
This work reflects my interests in race and the politics of representation and theatre and performance as a tool of social justice and activism. Although my main research focus is on plays and theatre, I watch a lot of films and television for pleasure and am interested in how they are used to explore these important concerns.
Do familiarise yourselves with the information on this Moodle page and start watching some of the required films and doing the required readings.
This course is being taught on Monday afternoons so will see you on the first Monday of the first teaching week of 2023-24. We are only a small group and I look forward to teaching you all.
Lynette
Dr Rebecca McCutcheon (Rebecca.McCutcheon@rhul.ac.uk)
Course Tutors:
Dr Chris Megson
Prof Helen Nicholson
Dr Libby Worth
Production Manager: Sean Brennan
The Group Performance is a core experience for students in their third year. In setting up this course we have responded to the rising standard of student creative work over the last ten years, shown in increasingly rigorous practical work in the department and with a consistent stream of students going on to work in professional theatre contexts. We wanted to embed some of this work more centrally in the curriculum in order to offer a space in which students can explore their own creative ideas, placed within a robust framework of research and contextual understanding.
On this course, you will make your own workin small groups. The result will be a performance of up to 30 minutes; this will be shown in a Finalist Festival season in week 6 of the Summer Term.
The course is taught more like a dissertation in that you take primary responsibility for shaping the development of the project, and your supervisor will offer advice, make recommendations, and comment on the work as it evolves. A core concern of the course is for you to locate your own work within a wider body of theatre practice. At the same time, the project and your process of work should be informed by and build on previous learning in your drama degree.