Explore dance and choreography in the 'expanded field' – where boundaries between disciplines blur and new forms emerge. In this module, you'll investigate how dance and choreography can function as tools for research, experimentation, and creative expression beyond traditional formats. You'll engage with conceptual and post-conceptual approaches, and explore how choreography can take shape through movement, sound, text, images, objects, or a combination of these. You'll be encouraged to rethink and expand your own creative processes – questioning what choreographic work can be, how it might be made, and what it can communicate. Through critical reflection and hands-on practice, you'll test new ideas, challenge assumptions, and develop your voice within experimental and interdisciplinary contexts. This module invites you to experiment with form, structure, and meaning – asking what holds value in choreographic work, and how dance might generate or reveal knowledge. You'll also explore different ways of presenting and sharing your work, considering the roles of audience, interaction, and context.
Explore contemporary performance from multiple perspectives – as artist, audience, curator, producer, and critic. This module invites you to engage with current debates and cultural contexts surrounding performance-making, presentation, and reception. You'll explore topics such as arts producing, programming, curation, critical writing, choreography analysis, aesthetics, and audience engagement. A key focus will be on performance festivals – particularly within Yorkshire and internationally – where you'll analyse curatorial themes, artistic programming, and the political and cultural frameworks they operate within. Through discussion, writing, and first-hand experience, you'll consider questions of visibility, accessibility, popularity, and value in contemporary performance culture. You'll be encouraged to debate and critique selected works and artists, drawing on aesthetic, political, and philosophical perspectives. This may include opportunities to attend, respond to, or even present work within a festival context, developing your critical voice in professional settings.
Develop your skills as a teaching artist, exploring how to share your creative practice with integrity and confidence. This module recognises that many performance makers also work as teachers — leading workshops, masterclasses, or sharing practice as part of touring and public engagement. You'll explore how teaching can be a meaningful extension of your creative work, and how to develop the skills needed to lead workshops and learning environments effectively. You'll reflect on how your choreographic ideas, creative values, and embodied knowledge inform your approach to teaching. Through practical and reflective work, you'll consider how to shape your identity as a teacher, and examine what it means to teach with artistic integrity in contemporary contexts. The module focuses on the teaching of creative practice — including pedagogical principles, group leadership, and workshop design — giving you space to test ideas, build confidence, and explore how teaching can sit alongside and support your artistic career.
Develop your skills in improvisation as a live performance practice. In this module, you'll explore improvisational methods across a range of roles – including performer, maker, collaborator, director and facilitator. Through ensemble and solo work, you'll engage with spontaneous composition, using imagery, scores, concepts, and structures to generate performance material. You'll investigate improvisation as a distinct artistic practice, challenging the idea that it's separate from choreographic or creative making. Through practice and reflection, you'll experience self-organising systems in action and consider the aesthetics, values, and ideologies that inform improvisational practice today.
This module explores specialist approaches to performer training, focusing on developing embodied skills within your own evolving practice. You'll engage in a programme designed to enhance intuitive, insider knowledge of performance, supported by critical reflective practice. By the end of the module, you'll have expanded your movement range, deepened your individual potential, and made progress toward improved overall health and wellbeing.
Work with an established professional – either in-house or external – to develop a mentor-mentee relationship with a choreographic artist. Through this collaboration, and via workshops, showings, and critical discussions, you'll cultivate a professional working environment to support the development of your choreographic practice. You'll devise a project plan that culminates in a final performance work. Throughout this self-directed choreographic process, your mentor will guide and support your emerging practice at key stages. You'll also negotiate a 'learning contract' with your module leader and/or mentor, based on your project plan. This agreement will help identify your learning needs and clarify what you aim to achieve through the mentorship.
This module provides a range of professional training opportunities to enhance your existing practice and develop your skills in arts facilitation and project management. Through practical workshops and supervised projects, you’ll be supported to develop co-creation and/or participatory work within contexts such as health, education, social cohesion, and active citizenship. You’ll collaborate with partner organisations to deliver a live project, while also producing a documented portfolio that captures your process. Alongside your practical work, a series of lectures and seminars — with contributions from guest speakers — will support you in identifying and critiquing the socio-political contexts that shape arts practices with specific communities. A written essay will provide space to explore the political and ethical questions arising from your own and others’ practice. Areas for critical analysis may include facilitation, quality, non-professional labour, exploitation, authenticity, empowerment, the role of the artist, activism, community-building, amateurism, representation of identities, creative participation, and agency.
Design, manage, and complete a unique project under the guidance of a supervisor. This module is ideal if you already have a project in process or are at the early stages of developing one. Projects may include the delivery of an Arts Council-funded initiative, the publication of a research article, or the investigation of training practices located outside of your primary discipline.