Theatre Workshop 1

Tutor(s): various
Assessment: practical essays [80%], participation [20%]

This module offers the opportunity for students to engage with, and critically reflect upon, the practical and analytical processes involved in making theatrical performance. It also involves students in the laboratory exploration of dramatic texts from a variety of historical periods and offers a point of encounter and engagement with some of the conventions and conditions of their production. It provides an introduction to the modus operandi and ethos of practical work on the degree programme, inducts students into good studio practice (including health and safety issues), and introduces them to the technical resources of the Roehampton studios.

The module is made up of a series of studio-based practical workshops, through which students explore some of the key elements that make up the languages of theatre and performance, and learn how to use these languages in a series of small theatre-making exercises. In this module the exercises are primarily oriented towards theatre texts (students will engage with devising strategies beyond theatre texts when they move to Theatre Workshop 2 in the spring term). A range of texts will be explored, from three or four different historical moments. Through this process of laboratory exploration, students will engage creatively and critically with the ways in which theatrical meaning may be made and experienced, as well as with how other historical periods may have encoded and interpreted the same. The skills developed on this module underpin the students’ spring-term work on Production Project.