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Welcome to Ensemble: Political Performance. 

Ensemble: Political Performance is a 20-credit module where you will engage in various workshop activities that will culminate in a devised performance in week 15 (w/c 5th June 2023). Through this process you will examine, through practice, selected approaches to devising techniques and explore the place of the individual within an ensemble. The module will investigate the performer’s relationship to creativity and the cultural significance of that relationship. Workshops will be designed to teach you the meaning of process in a devising context so that some of your learning will happen through exploring creative exercises, with support from background reading and SOL.  

In contemporary performance practice it is often the case that work will develop from a visual stimulus as opposed to (or in conjunction with) a dramatic text. The module will invite you to begin to consider yourselves as composers, performers and documenters of your own work. It will further your understanding of the conceptual relationship between the performer and the audience. 

Ensemble: Political Performance looks to develop your visual analysis and ask you to slow down, look closely, and think critically about what you see as you translate 2-D images into three dimensions; and further interrogate compositional techniques and devices to create personal and political performance that powerfully resonates with 21st Century life. 

This year, as a starting point for devising on this module, we will be responding to artist Simryn Gill’s photographs entitled A Small Town at the Turn of the Century (2000).