Theatre and Performance Studies
Explore the world through the lens of Theatre and Performance Studies with one of the top departments in the UK.
Offering academic rigour, practical skills and connections with the industry, this degree has career prospects both within the arts sector and far beyond. You’ll be taught by world-leading academics and cutting-edge theatre practitioners.
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Our courses
Core course team
anna six
anna six’s research explores the intersections between arts and health. In particular, her work intervenes in cultural politics and clinical practices in relation to madness, mental health, and psychiatry. Her recent monograph Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness examined artistic practice and uncovered the clinical lessons of creative work. six’s current project is investigating the politics of tenderness and questioning the meaning, nature, and practice of ‘care’. Her artistic practice with her theatre company, Idiot Child, is likewise engaged with questions around health and wellbeing. The company explore difficult feelings and experiences through performance and their current project, Never Gonna Give You Up, explores loneliness.
Saul Hewish
Saul Hewish is one of the country's leading practitioners in the use of drama and theatre with offenders. He was a founder member and former director of Geese Theatre (UK) (est. 1987) and since 1996 has worked in a freelance capacity developing drama-based responses to crime within youth offending teams, social services departments, and special educational settings.
In 1999 he co-founded Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabilitation), with Chris Johnston. Over the last twenty years this company has built a strong reputation for innovative and experimental arts-based projects within the criminal justice system in the UK and across Europe. This includes theatre and digital video projects in prisons as well as the production of cross artform projects that span the divide between prison and the wider public. He is a co-author of Challenging Experience: An Experiential Approach to the Treatment of Serious Offenders and was a recipient of a 2005 Butler Trust Certificate Award, a national award which recognises exceptional work by staff in HM Prison Service.
Nadine Holdsworth
Nadine Holdsworth’s research spans questions of representation, participation, citizenship, political change and cultural value. She has worked on the creative activism of a number of leading mid-century practitioners including Joan Littlewood and John McGrath and published English Theatre and Social Abjection in 2020, which explores how theatre and performance can be used to illuminate pressing social issues and marginalised groups in society. These concerns are central to her current body of research and socially-engaged projects addressing arts, creativity and homelessness (you can read about this work here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/scapvc/artscreativityhomelessness/). Nadine is also a Trustee of Underground Lights, a Coventry-based community theatre company for people who have experienced homelessness, mental health issues and social isolation.
Yvette Hutchison
Yvette Hutchison is a South African academic whose work focuses on Anglophone African theatre, dance and intercultural performance. She has taught on and worked in various theatre for development and community theatre projects in Africa and the UK. In 2015 she co-founded the African Women Playwrights Network through an AHRC-funded project to virtually connect African women-identified creative practitioners with one another, programmers, funders, educators and audiences. Her current collaborative project is with South African, Dr Lliane Loots, artistic director of the FLATFOOT Dance Company and JOMBA! Festival. Their project Encountering disability through contemporary dance in Africa is tracing how disability/ integrated dance is being used to negotiate citizenship in various African countries including SA, Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique and Nigeria.
Bobby Smith
Bobby Smith’s research and practice examines the ways in which theatre and performance offer artistic and creative approaches to activism, education and social action. He was previously a freelance practitioner with experience in settings including schools, youth centres, within the criminal justice system and internationally. He also managed and coordinated applied theatre projects – for example, a drugs education and sexual health project in West London schools. Bobby has worked as a consultant for several charities, writing resources and training staff, particularly in the area of Theatre for Development.
Bobby’s most recent work includes building a network of theatre practitioners exploring violence in Rwanda, Kenya and Northern Ireland and projects which consider the climate crisis with young people internationally.
