Bachelor of Fine Arts (Theatre) (B-FATH)

The Bachelor of Fine Arts (Theatre) is an interdisciplinary, full-time intensive-degree focused on fostering outstanding new generations of theatre makers who create original contemporary performances. The course is designed to bring together students with a diverse range of interests in performance creation and prepare them to become critical, curious and inventive theatre makers and highly skilled devisors of original performance work. The course places an emphasis on preparing students for diverse careers and professional practice and on artistic and cultural leadership.

This hands-on, practical degree provides students with a broad creative skill set, including cutting-edge approaches to performance aesthetics and composition, critical thinking and contextual theory, embodied, somatic training, and dramaturgy for contemporary performance.

Throughout their studies, students will encounter a range of concepts designed to place them at the forefront of industry practice, including immersive and participatory theatre, inclusive theatre practice, documentary and audio performance, physical theatre and movement, strategies of facilitation and directing, methods for writing for performance and ethical frameworks for theatre-making and performance with and for community and in applied theatre contexts.

As part of developing an independent artistic practice, students experience a range of theatre-making provocations - solo and ensemble practice, site-specific work, applied theatre, theatre for young audiences and contemporary and experimental performance. Recent projects include collaborations with Polyglot Theatre, The Unconformity, Ilbijerri Theatre and Science Gallery Melbourne.

Students will develop their own unique practice as theatre makers informed by an understanding of their own interests and identity, historical paradigms and an application of current methodologies and thinking. Students have opportunities to engage in regional and national projects, undertake company residencies and be part of multiple public performance seasons.

The program culminates in the creation and performance of fully produced devised works in which students collaborate in pre-professional companies to conceive, develop, rehearse and present original works. These works are showcased to invited industry guests and a general public audience.

Students will learn from highly experienced staff and mentors and collaborate on a range of live and digital theatre making contexts with invited industry professionals. Previous projects have included students making original performance in the Royal Botanic Gardens, abandoned shops and emporiums in the CBD and in gallery spaces, as well as more traditional theatre spaces and studios. Theatre students also collaborate throughout the course with students from other disciplines and schools at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) including students from Interactive Composition, Dance, Film and Television and Production.

The Bachelor of Fine Arts (Theatre) enables graduates to enter the profession with the capacity to contribute to and transform Australia’s theatre ecology and instigate change and leadership with clarity and skill. Graduates work at all levels of the profession and are renowned for their capacity to work creatively and collaboratively, in both independent and mainstage professional theatre as well as in youth arts, festivals, community cultural development, film, television, radio, new media, arts and health and education contexts.

Students are able to study 50 credit points of Breadth from other disciplines on offer at the University of Melbourne allowing VCA Theatre students to graduate with a range of skills and knowledge and multidisciplinary approaches to bring to their arts practice and careers.