Acting and Creating Theatre (Stage 2)

If you already possess acting and performance experience, or have completed our Acting – An Introduction (Stage 1) short course, this advanced course has been designed to challenge you and enhance your existing skills and techniques as well as explore new ones.

Whether you want to advance your acting skills to tackle a Shakespearian text or take your skills to new levels, this 10-week focused and practical-based programme will provide you with the applied skills to approach either or both of these.

You'll explore various ways to develop an idea, from improvisation, writing techniques and physical theatre. All staying true to the techniques you shall be taught to help dissolve habitual defences to become free, instinctual and a playful actor with the aim of being able to be completely ‘in the moment’ when you perform.

You'll explore and examine ways to dissect, understand and play it, whilst being reminded of key approaches to acting and how to apply the techniques. You'll then go on to look at different approaches to creating your own work. Starting with a theme, idea or character – exploring different mediums and developing it into the most fitting – be it a comedy sketch show, immersive theatre piece, radio play or musical.

As the course progresses you'll continue to develop your own work to present or focus on advancing your acting skills further to perform a Shakespeare monologue or scene.

Throughout the course, you'll be given advice on how to take your work further to outside audiences and explore the variety of different avenues you can go down.

Your tutor, Charmaine, is a Theatre Practitioner working as an actor, writer, director and producer who has accumulated vast experience in acting and directing Shakespeare and having written and created many theatre productions for the stage, open-air and in the community. Charmaine’s approach aims to allow her students to access, tap into and activate the sensory brain to balance with the narrative logical mind.

Charmaine has worked with a variety of people to develop acting skills including children, students, professionals and absolute beginners working in a fun, accessible and approachable way.

• The fundamentals of character and story development will be explored through a variety of techniques, enabling you to create believable, fully developed, three-dimensional characters and worlds
• You'll be pushed to explore your full potential as a performer and creative
• You'll be guided through and taught exercises to create your own material to develop
• You'll learn how the industry works from acting to casting to scriptwriting to directing and producing and why it’s called show business
• After refreshing your knowledge on the fundamentals and learning some contemporary approaches to acting you'll put the skills you’ve learned into practice in a fun, supportive environment
• Alongside refreshing yourself with the fundamentals, you'll explore new approaches to acting and creating your own work and have the choice to either develop that or continue to develop your skills in performing Shakespeare
• Emphasis is placed on finding, developing and building confidence in your own voice as a performer or creative

The course aims to:

• Provide you with varied practical skills to be able to create your own work
• Enable you to confidently tackle a Shakespearean text
• Enhance your perspective of how to go about developing your own work and the different routes to sharing it with an audience
• Develop confidence, empathy and understanding of human behaviour

• You'll have developed techniques to tackle Shakespeare and creating your own work
• You'll feel confident about accessing your subconscious and trusting your own voice in developing your own work
• All students with 100% course attendance will be issued with an official AUB Short Course certificate of attendance. To request your certificate get in touch with the course team at shortcourses@aub.ac.uk

This is an advanced course so you'll need to have prior acting and performing experience to get the most out of it. Ideally you'll have completed our Acting – An Introduction (Stage 1) short course. Suitable for actors aged 18+.

• A pencil, rubber and notebook
• An open mind
• Wear comfortable, practical clothing and footwear

All additional course materials are included in the course fee.