Module Directory

This module offers students the opportunity to focus on a small-scale performance project that will be suitable for studio spaces, community venues, and/or touring to fringe festivals in the UK and beyond. Driven by their own interests and strengths, students will form small companies to develop, rehearse, perform, and pitch short performances of 45-60 minutes. In addition, each company will develop marketing materials, a budget, and technical specifications.

The module will provide further professionalisation support through a partnership with Colchester Fringe Festival and its co-founders Cameron Abbott-Betts and Steve Goatman. Performances will premiere in a mini-festival at the Lakeside Theatre, in front of an invited audience and including a post-show Q&A and critique.

We anticipate inviting specialist drama practitioners to deliver certain sessions in e.g. producing small-scale work for studio spaces, community venues, and/or festivals; intimacy and movement choreography; applying for funding; and any other areas of particular specialism that students require.

The aim is that this module will be responsive to student need. We will programme bespoke sessions with local and London-based freelance drama practitioners as required.

The aims of this module are:

• To equip students with the necessary skills and experience to develop, rehearse, produce, and tour a show suitable for studio spaces, community venues, and/or fringe festival venues.


• That by the end of the module, students will have a complete package with which they can pitch their show to venues and/or festivals, including Colchester Fringe.

By the end of this module, students will be expected to be able to:

1. Select or devise and develop appropriate material for a studio, community or fringe festival venue.


2. Work collaboratively in a small company to produce a performance from start to finish, including para-theatrical materials such as marketing copy and a budget.


3. Research, understand and complete funding applications.


4. Pitch their show to an appropriate studio, community venue or fringe festival (including Colchester Fringe and other festivals in the UK and around the world).

Sessions will cover some or all of the following:

• Approaches to rehearsal (acting/directing)


• Devising, improvising and collaborative processes


• Scriptwriting, adaptation and dramaturgy


• Applying for Festivals and Funding


• Design and technical aspects


• Technical introduction to the Lakeside Theatre


• Fringe festivals: history, theory and practice

This will largely be a self-directed module, as appropriate to postgraduate study, with taught sessions, guest speaker sessions, and supervisions anchoring students’ development of their work across the term.

• 3 x 3hr taught sessions: Weeks 16, 18, and 20
• 3 x 3hr speaker sessions: weeks 17, 19 and 21

These provide opportunities for content delivery in relation to the module assessments and a broad overview of the importance of fringe festivals around the world.

• Self-Directed R&D: 10x 3hr independently-led workshops (one in each week of term)

Timetabled, self-directed workshops provide students with the structure within which to develop and rehearse their performances. The module handbook will suggest an area of focus for each week, but ultimately it is up to the student companies how they spend that time.

• Supervisions: 4x 30min rehearsal observations, during the Independent R&D workshops in Weeks 17, 19, 21 and 23.
• Assessed performances in week 24 in the Lakeside Studio.

The module supervisor will check in with each company at staggered points throughout the term, to provide constructive feedback on their process.