Undergraduate Courses
Aberystwyth University
Led by internationally recognised practitioners, this degree scheme takes a fresh, radical approach to design in performance, looking beyond the established boundaries of set, costume, lighting and sound design to take a total view of performance space as an expressive artistic field in its own right. This is not a degree in ‘how to do it’, but an inquiry into how it might be done.
Through a combination of practical and theoretical explorations, you will critically examine and engage with a wide range of contemporary practices from playhouse theatre to site-specific performance and from environmental theatre to performance installation. As the scheme progresses, the focus of study sharpens steadily upon your own practice as an independent artist, applying your acquired knowledge and skills to the making of work that is fresh, radical and expressive for you, within or beyond the context of theatre and performance.
Bristol Old Vic Theatre School
3-year undergraduate Honours degree
This undergraduate degree provides the specialist skills required to work in the production industries. A range of specialisation options are available in the final year including scenic construction, prop-making and scenic crafts, film production, lighting and electrics, sound, and stage management.
Bristol Old Vic Theatre School
2-year Foundation Degree in Arts and 1-year BA (Hons) top-up
This highly practical course will prepare you for a career in costume-making and supervision for theatre, film and TV by working on a variety of different style productions. Students on the one-year top-up choose a specialist project and complete an extended industry placement.
University of Derby
Derby Theatre will be your ‘home’, offering you valuable industry experience and contacts. This course is unique; no other university level course is housed in a producing theatre. You will be at the centre of this professional environment.
Guildhall School of Music and Drama
The Production Arts undergraduate programme equips you with the skills you need to succeed in the professional arts industry, with graduates going on to work in theatre, events, television and film. We strongly believe that your training should be tailored to your individual career aims.
For this reason, you will select one of four pathways, each with a different emphasis:
- Stage Management
- Costume
- Theatre Technology (Sound, Lighting, Video, Automation and Stage Technology)
- Design Realisation (Scenic Art, Scenic Construction and Prop Making)
Within each pathway you can study elements of the other three. For example, if you want to learn about props and scenery construction but retain an interest in lighting, or gain experience in sound while focusing mainly on stage management, you can choose accordingly. The programme is flexible enough to allow for a wide range of interests, or a more specialised approach.
Rose Bruford College
The Theatre Design course offers a highly creative preparation for a successful career in theatre and associated live and recorded performance events. You will experience the total design process from the initial creative dialogue, through visualisation to full performance.
Placing equal emphasis on costume and set design, you will learn to respond visually and creatively to stimuli ranging from text and character to music, physicality and time. The course will also develop your professional awareness and understanding of the responsibilities of the designer through a comprehensive programme of classes, projects and public performances.
Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama
We are a world leader in the training of designers for performance producing Golden Globe, Tony & BAFTA-winning graduates. Our graduates are regularly honoured at the prestigious Linbury Prize for Stage Design We offer immersive, hands-on practical and ‘fit for the future’ training and have built strong relationships with major UK arts companies in film, TV, and theatre. Recent student & graduate film and TV credits include Willow, Havoc, His Dark Materials, Sex Education, Winter King among others. and get the chance to work with some of the country’s leading theatre, opera and dance companies and to exhibit at the National Theatre. We can offer placement opportunities with renowned venues like Royal Opera House, National Theatre, Sherman Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company among others. Our in-house production company, the Richard Burton Company, produces around 24 productions a year which offer our students cross-course collaborative opportunities Our design students create their design work for public performances, working with directors, actors, musicians’ singers and stage managers. The performances range from classic dramas, specially commissioned plays, main stage musicals, large-scale operas and, uniquely for design, site-specific puppetry. We offer regular talks and visits by leading international practitioners like RWCMD Fellows Pamela Howard and Paule Constable. We have a high ratio of staff to students with lots of dedicated one-to-one training and mentoring available to our students.
RWCMD also offer an MA Design for Performance, with pathways in: Set & Costume Design; Costume Design & Construction: Set Design; Scenic Arts & Construction; Prop Design & Build; Lighting Design: Sound Design; Digital & Media Design.
The BA Performance: Design and Practice is an interdisciplinary performance course for students developing both live and screen-based performance practices. Challenging assumptions and territories, this course explores theatre, film, video and live art. It emphasises collaborative practice, instilling a strong set of specialist and transferable skills.
It encourages an experimental, cross-disciplinary and design-led methods while developing technical and practical tools in scenography, dramaturgy and movement.
Our student body and teaching team come from a wide range of personal and professional backgrounds. As a community, we are deeply committed to the idea that diverse environments are the most vibrant creatively and we actively celebrate difference. As a course, we encourage creative risk-taking by cultivating a supportive and accepting environment in which unique individual and collective perspectives can develop. We believe in the potential for performance to change the society in which we all live.
The course offers a flexible approach to charting your own creative pathway enabling you to be responsive and adaptable to the contemporary pressures of a creative career and ready to grow in response to new conceptual and technological developments in our increasingly digital world
Students are encouraged to shape their own unique specialisms and frequently graduate as multi-disciplinary practitioners. Subsequently our students graduate into wide ranging careers in performance-related industries and frequently transfer these skills to wider professions. Students typically have careers as: performance designers, directors, movement specialists, art directors, artists and creative facilitators. They work across many different fields that include performance, dance, live art, digital performance, art direction, event design, immersive experience, transmedia theatre, storytelling, applied theatre, documentary, film and moving image. Students also go on to further postgraduate study.
UAL London College of Fashion
This course offers a holistic approach to the study of costume. This course is for students who are interested in designing and making. This comprises physical and digital ways of designing and creating for live theatre, dance, film, and television, as well as more specialised performances.
We nurture every student’s distinctive voice, teaching them how to embrace challenge and how to lead their professional field with cutting-edge approaches across all channels: live, broadcast, digital, interactive, experiential and experimental. Through specialist research and collaborative work, we empower our students to think differently by combining traditional and digital techniques in design and costume-making that result in creative and sustainable practices that improve the way we work and live.
UAL Wimbledon College of Art
BA Theatre Design at Wimbledon College of Arts focuses on set and costume design. The course also introduces you to other areas of design for performance such as video projection, lighting and sound design. You will gain the practical and conceptual skills required by today’s professional designers. We prepare you to work in live events, contemporary theatre and performance design.
The Nothern School of Art
The Northern School of Art is a creative community dedicated to preparing our students for employment in the creative industries. We have a great heritage working as an art school since the 1870s. Our degree and postgraduate courses are delivered from our vibrant campus in Hartlepool – co located with our commercial venture, The Northern Studios – more than 4000sqm of film and TV production facilities and sound stages.
Our Stage and Screen Faculty offers degrees covering:
Production Design
Costume Design and Making
Modelmaking & VFX
Film and Theatre making
Acting
Our production designers and model makers study in The Scott Building (named for the illustrious brothers who studied here) a brand new addition to our campus which has a double height construction area for full scale set construction.
Our BA (Hons) degree in Production Design for Stage and Screen gives students the skills required of professionals working in this exciting industry. Undergraduates will work over three years to develop the needed and more niche skills of this craft such as: prop making, sculpting, concept art and character development. These specialties give our graduates a competitive edge when applying for roles after graduation. This degree offers you a unique and challenging opportunity to develop a range of specialist skills in set design and the development and production of props and characters. With more than twenty years’ experience in developing production designers for the industry we provide a degree that will allow graduates to stand out from the crowd with a mix of niche skills. You will be designing sets, characters and props from your first term
The BA (Hons) Costume Interpretation with Design degree is set in the thriving filming locations of the North East with great links to industry leaders in costume. This programme is a provider of costumiers for the entertainment industry and will equip you with the skills in costume construction and design you need. Alongside bespoke skills of millinery and tailoring; we are one of the few design degrees in the country that offer this. Our degree is unique in that we have a distinctive studio culture; no two days on this course are ever the same. We back this up with a wealth of industry links, exhibitions and opportunities
Nottingham Trent University
Explore all aspects of contemporary design practice for theatre and the live performance, including set and costume design; construction; digital technologies and design; lighting design and audio visual; site-specific design; puppetry; heritage installation; and design for community and education. The course is facilitated by the highly skilled team of staff and technicians who have years of professional and academic knowledge.
Royal Central School of Speech & Drama
At Central we put your future career at the heart of everything we do, and when you leave, you’ll be a specialist in your subject – with the preparation you’ll need to get work in a fast-moving performing arts industry. Our mission is to inspire, educate and train the performers, practitioners and creatives who will shape the future of theatre and the performing arts.
BA Design for Performance. The course develops practitioners with a strong sense of direction and identity, and an ability to think conceptually. From the first year you undertake speculative design projects that will challenge and test ideas in a broad range of performance contexts, from text-based drama to opera, dance, site-specific performance and installations, under the guidance of professional directors, designers and choreographers.
University of Wales, Trinity Saint David
The BA Theatre Design & Production degree is a practical, hands-on programme designed to build upon a broad foundation of production skills, right through to producing performances and events.
The course enables you to explore, design and create exciting new work alongside industry professionals.
The key principle of the degree is developing students who have a well-rounded and solid knowledge base, are skilled in more than one area and ready to engage in the wider performance sector.
Throughout the degree, there is flexibility to allow you to specialise and explore your own pathway. Offering a variety of work placement opportunities, study abroad and projects to make sure you get the experience and the support into employment you want.
Middlesex University
The Theatre Design pathway at Middlesex University has a long tradition of equipping students with a wide range of theatre-making and production skills, empowering them to put their creative ideas into action. We offer specialist teaching and facilities for set, costume, sound, lighting, video and digital design. Students get hands-on with the key processes and principles of stagecraft in our cutting-edge spaces in London and with a range of industry partners in and beyond London, as well as engaging with a diverse range of critical, cultural and historical perspectives on theatre as a live art form. We also provide a strong focus on key entrepreneurial and administrative skills required for a career in the creative industries, equipping students not only to find work but also to affect change as artists and citizens. https://www.mdx.ac.uk/courses/undergraduate/theatre-design-production
Arts University Plymouth
BA (Hons) Costume Prodcution . From script to character realisation you will develop your practical and design skills for costume in performance.The unique combination of research study, technical skills and opportunities to experience the industry at first hand, will give you a creative and robust academic training.In dedicated studio workshops you will develop the most sougth after production skills, costume interpretaiton pattern cutting and wearable prop techniques and also benefit from masterclasses led by experts in speciaslt areas such as millinery and costume enhancement.
UCA Farnham
Our exciting BA (Hons) Design for Theatre and Screen course will support you in creating dynamic environments, costumes and props for the stage and for screen.
You will learn the essential skills needed for the entire creative process, from design into making. As you progress through the course, you will put those skills into practice as you take part in work placements and collaborative projects.
Gaining a deeper understanding of the discipline, you will learn about the history and theory of theatre and film arts, underpinned by art and design history.
The course is based at UCA Farnham where the arts are threaded through everything we do.
Our students have the freedom and confidence to fully immerse themselves in their passions and grow both as practitioners and people.