Contemporary Performance and International Relations BA (with Foundation Year)

CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE

On this course you will be making work that physically brings the audience into the performance environment. It is about exploring drama and performance through the interactions between bodies and environments and how different technologies can facilitate this. How can light function as an actor? What are the merits and limitations of devising a performance for an audience of one person? What staging possibilities does virtual reality and video gaming provide the performance-maker? Here you will learn about the different approaches to creating your own immersive performance environments as well as gaining an important understanding of the digital creative sector.

Located within the Creative Campus, this community of artists, musicians and performers is a vibrant and exciting environment to create work. Throughout your studies you will be equipped with the relevant technical knowledge and skills to realise and manage your own projects, supported by a team of highly qualified tutors. These will include acquiring skills in digital coding, lighting design, audio and video editing, 360 film and sound recording, motion capture and projection mapping. In addition to making performances, you will present ideas verbally, as well as enhancing your skills in critical and reflective writing.

Your three years begins with an introduction to immersive performance practices before you journey into the exciting challenges of audience participation and interaction. Moving outside of the campus, the city of Liverpool itself will become a site for performance, echoing the work of immersive practitioners such as Punchdrunk, dreamthinkspeak and Shunt. Your final year will involve a push into new and experimental performance technologies, presenting performance projects in virtual worlds. This will culminate in you selecting either to complete a placement within an arts organisation or to take the lead as project manager of a major performance project of your own devising. This final year will also require you to complete an independent research project on a topic of your own choice.

This course is for those interested in making innovative and dynamic worlds for their audiences to interact with and explore. It will appeal to students interested in contemporary performance and its overlaps with creative technologies.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Every day, international issues are in the news headlines – this is your chance to become an expert on relations between states, economies, ideas and societies. In a world where nuclear weapons remain primed for use, the world economy teeters on the brink of collapse and delicate ecosystems are under threat, it is little wonder that our International Relations degree is proving a popular choice among students who wish to better understand the world’s most challenging problems.

International Relations is a multidisciplinary subject, which draws in contributions from politics, history, media, sociology, law, economics and religion. Global issues dominate the news headlines on a daily basis and International Relations will allow you to focus on this dimension of politics. This is an opportunity to become an expert in international issues in a historical, political and cultural context.

All our academics are conducting internationally published research. Our key strengths are in Theories of International Relations; Peace and Conflict; British and US foreign policy and EU and UN politics. Our subject deals squarely with some of the most daunting, intractable but important challenges of today.