Stage Design & Scenography and Creative Industries Business Management (with Foundation Year)

STAGE DESIGN & SCENOGRAPHY

On this course you will be trained to design and make immersive worlds for different audiences. It’s about exploring drama and performance through the interactions between bodies, environments and creative technologies. How can light function as an actor? How can a set be built by sound alone? How can we subtly direct our audiences without them knowing? What are the ethical challenges of creating a performance solely for one person? As worldbuilders, you will learn about the different approaches to designing and creating your own immersive performance environments, supported by technical training that will prepare you for the creative sector.

Your three years begins with an introduction to immersive performance practices and scenographic design 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 and the development of escape rooms and other ludic practices. 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 who are passionate about theatre and performance but are more interested in working behind the scenes.

CREATIVE INDUSTRIES BUSINESS MANAGEMENT

The lecture series for this course will follow two interdependent, integrated streams. One will develop students’ historical, theoretical and critical awareness of the relationship between arts, cultural entrepreneurship and business management from a variety of viewpoints – film, music, dance, theatre, festival, gallery etc. The other series will be more professionally focused exploring the changing environment with respect to business methods (finance, planning and the law), and marketing and branding strategies within the creative industries.

The practical seminars and workshops for the course will focus around important case studies to highlight different business models within the creative industries from SMEs to national organisations as well as allowing an opportunity to explore important, innovative approaches to marketing and communications strategies within the sector.

The programme will increasingly introduce professionalised; work placement elements from the second part of Level I. So that by the programme’s end, students will have gathered experience of working with external professional creative industries organisations.