Dance Practice and Performance

Module overview

These practical classes provide a framework for you to explore movement potential using a variety of approaches. Technical, performance, improvisational and interpretative skills are addressed using the interplay between action, imagination, observation and questioning.

You will be encouraged to reflect on your own practices as dancers and to find ways to explore detailed kinesthetic awareness through testing (trial and error) and to define how movement is experienced in relation to space, time and gravity. You will be involved in expressive and interpretative tasks in response to music, sound accompaniment or text and work with other dancers to locate synergies and sensitivity in your danced relationships.

You will experience a variety of practices as part of the portfolio. The approach and demands of each class will vary according to the interests and expertise of each tutor offering a range of experiences from within the professional field.

Teaching and learning

The delivery of this modules is four, one and half hour practical studio sessions per week.

There will be an additional 30 minutes of digital support per week. This will consist of audio-visual resources that accompany and support the practice delivery. 

Teaching practice is aligned with the core principles of UDL and our philosophy is to be inclusive, respectful and accessible to all. Practical classes, workshops, peer review and tutorials. Peer review and critical feedback will be included in all sessions and tutorials can be booked during office hours.

Formative feedback is inherent in the delivery of a dance practice sessions and provided through manifold embodied perspectives covering the full range of learning styles, including physical/kinaesthetic, aural/auditory-musical, visual/spatial, verbal/linguistic, logical/anatomy-somatic, intra and interpersonal approaches.

Furthermore, every session involves tasks and/or mini projects which provide opportunities for peer and tutor feedback and formative learning.  

Group and individual tutorials outside of the taught sessions offer opportunities to discuss individual interests, challenges and projects. 

Assessment

This module will be assessed using a practical class 1 (30%) and a practical 2 (50%).

Module overview

This module interrogates practically and theoretically the question of what happens when we have a creative encounter. It investigates what happens when we have a creative encounter with others, such as established and novel lines of enquiry for dancers and performers; encounters in new settings in and outside of dance; and in and with institutions such as museums; work with and for different communities; and critical artistic engagement with past and present contexts.

It investigates how we might engage together in a creative practice and queries why a practice might be important, or excluding, or lean into an embodied, relational engagement necessary to create the work we are passionate about.

The module will explore topics that put the creative encounter front and centre, for example, leadership and collaboration, working with other professional artists and those who come to dance for the first time; delving into the topics of cultural heritage and community; institutional contexts and working through how we use creative practice to engage with topics such as care, socially engaged facilitation, audience relation, direction, producing, curating; showcasing topics connected to why we do this, for example to make an impact on health, empowerment, society, audiences, institutions, cultural engagement and interpretation; creating the ‘what if...’, using our imaginations to set up creative encounters as dance activists, artists, vision-makers of the future.

Teaching and learning

This is a year-long module, consisting of one, two-hour seminar, workshop or experiential laboratory per week.

The sessions will be a mixture of practical and theoretical engagement and indicated clearly to students.

There will be an additional 30 minutes of online digital support per week. This will consist of audio-visual resources will deepen understanding and support practice and thinking.

Assessment

This module will be assessed using a digital exposition (50%) and a project presentation (50%).

Module overview

This module is for you to engage with, demonstrate and develop your performance practice. It rests on one of the core understandings that underpins this programme: that through performance the dancer can engage with intellectual, imaginative, physical and kinaesthetic challenges in order to develop their learning.

This is supported and enhanced by the Thinking through Performance, Creative Encounters, Dance Practice and Approaching Performance modules. It draws insights from each of these modules and encourages you to demonstrate through performance, the links between technique, choreography and theoretical strands of study.  

You will have timetabled sessions with commissioned choreographers as well as the opportunity to work with student choreographers from both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. You will experience a variety of working methods, e.g. improvisation, learned repertoire, diverse devising processes and styles depending on the commissioning process each year.

Teaching and learning

This module consists of one, two-hour and 30 minute rehearsal each term week and an intensive period of rehearsals outside of regular term times with commissioned external choreographers up to around 30 hours of contact time.

Rehearsals will provide the context for learning to take place, emobodying the knowledge is what is required of students.

There will be an additional 30 minutes of online digital support per week. This will consist of reviewing rehearsal footage and being introduced to relevant choreographic work to support your understanding of the context of the work that you are doing. You will be expected to continue to practice the materials that you are working with between rehearsals.

The main focus of the teaching and learning in this module is through experiencing the creation of choreographic works through: Rehearsals that include workshopping ideas, choreographic tasks, Presentations and performances, small group or paired discussion, Tutorials, Assigned viewings/readings, Video observations and analysis and Attendance at performances.

These are all part of the working life of a dance artist. Giving you the opportunity to go through the choreograph process with a number of choreographers that will give you a breadth of experience.  

Discussion, reading, independent study and practice, video observations and analysis are all related activities that a professional dance artist would be using to support their career, in the context the MA they are supported and directed by tutors and peers. Here we seek to develop the positive habits that help sustain a career as a dance artist.  

Assessment

This module will be assessed using a series of performances that build your portfolio (100%).

Module overview

This module develops the work studied in Dance Practice. Approaching Performance and will deepen technical and artistic understanding and their exploration of movement potential using a range of practices.

You will critically interrogate your technical knowledge of dancing and deepen your awareness of communicating movement. You will be involved in expressive and interpretative tasks in response to music, sound accompaniment or text and work with other dancers to locate synergies and sensitivity in their danced relationships. Focus will be on performative qualities alongside essential technical practice.

Via a performative presentation, you can demonstrate advanced performance skills and the problems and possibilities of ‘being seen’ (Deborah Hay) considering ‘dancing as an ensemble’ as well as the performer-audience relationship.

You will experience a variety of practices as part of the portfolio. The approach and demands of each class will vary according to the interests and expertise of each tutor offering a range of experiences from within the professional field.

Teaching and learning

This module consists of four, one and a half dance studio practice classes per week

Teaching practice is aligned with the core principles of UDL and our philosophy is to be inclusive, respectful and accessible to all.

Practical classes, workshops, peer review and tutorials. Peer review and critical feedback will be included in all sessions and tutorials can be booked during office hours.

Formative feedback is inherent in the delivery of a dance practice sessions and provided through manifold embodied perspectives covering the full range of learning styles, including physical/kinaesthetic, aural/auditory-musical, visual/spatial, verbal/linguistic, logical/anatomy-somatic, intra and interpersonal approaches.

Every session involves tasks and/or mini projects which provide opportunities for peer and tutor feedback and formative learning.  

Group and individual tutorials outside of the taught sessions offer opportunities to discuss individual interests, challenges and projects. 

There will be an additional 30 minutes of online digital support per week. This will consist of audio-visual resources that accompany and support the practice delivery. 

Assessment

This module will be assessed using a practical dance class (50%) and a performative studio presentation (50%).

Module overview

This module invites you to interrogate artistic and performance practices, including your own modes of making, as forms of research discovery. It explores the relations between practice and different forms of codified and non-codified knowledge from the perspective of practitioners in dance, performance or other creative practices; and through exploration of concepts, theories and assumptions which underpin and inform performance.

Combining practice-as-research methodologies with philosophical enquiry, you will be challenged to deploy a range of critical research methodologies which combine the kinaesthetic, the self-reflective and the theoretical.

The module supports you to understand how artistic processes can be used to generate and embrace a multiplicity of conceiving, engaging and generating knowledges. Key topics include the nature of performance as art, epistemology, and the aesthetics and ethics of dance and performance, including the questioning of power structures within the field. These issues are examined through a combination of readings, discussions, practical tasks and embodied experiences, providing space to consider the cultural, political and ethical ramifications of performance practices in studio-based, classroom-based and hybrid settings.

Teaching and learning

This module is taught through a one, two-hour seminar and one, two-hour hybrid session per week.

Lecture and seminars will cover philosophical examinations of performance, while hybrid sessions interrogate the nature of artistic practices as a method of research. 

There will be an additional 30 minutes of online digital support per week. This will consist of audio-visual resources will deepen understanding and support practice and thinking.

Assessment

This module will be assessed using a presentation (50%) and a blog (50%).

Module overview

This independent study module is the ‘exit’ module of the MA Dance Practice and Performance programme: the project is designed to capture your learning through the programme, a presentation of where you see yourself as a dance artist and tests your readiness to embark or re-embark into your career.

The module provides opportunities for you to undertake independent practice research in order to produce a personal performance practice manifesto which fulfils your research interests and extrapolates the dance practice and performance discourse which you have encountered through the programme.

You will be encouraged to develop a professional, outward-facing project in order to engage with a unique vision for the development of your practice. The module will support your exploration and planning of performances, training schemes, dance workshops and rehearsal techniques, for example.

You will be encouraged to criticise, re-examine, re-invent or disrupt the artistic aims and perspectives of dance performance and to consider the implications for performers, training methods, institutions, and what we recognise as the ‘workforce’, labour and ethos of the dance ‘industry’.

You will develop original research which is supported by tutorials, peer review and workshops. The module operates as a series of practical workshops, laboratory tasks, feedback sessions, seminars and tutorials. Key feedback points are programmed to prepare you for independent working and lead to professional practice standards  

Teaching and learning

This module consists of six, three-hour sessions in the spring and summer and then another four, three-hour sessions for you to participate in group feedback sessions.

After the spring break, there will be another four, three-hour sessions for you to participate in group feedback sessions. The rest of the contact time will be arranged tutorials. 

Assessment

This module will be assessed using a work-in progress and proposal showing (30%) and a performance project and documentation (70%).