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Artisteducator in Theatre
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Course

Course

The full-time four-year course trains you to be a creative agent of change who uses your artistry to reveal and nurture the artistry in others.

What will you do during the course?

You do not take separate subjects but instead work on a project basis; everything you learn is meaningful, has a direct connection with practice and has theoretical relevance. Helping to make you an educated and critical maker. You spend a lot of time on the floor and learn to work with different communities within society.

Theatre is a place where people share stories and reflect on vital questions and social issues. As a maker and educator, you work with others and during the course you acquire the necessary skills, such as acting, design and theatre making.

We don’t tell our students what to do, we give them plenty of room to find out for themselves what they want to develop. We also question them on that. We take our students very seriously.

CORMAC BURMANIA, HEAD OF DEPARTMENT

Structure of the course

During the course we challenge you, while you are investigating, to form your own identity as a creator. You do this in all kinds of different contexts, such as a neighbourhood or community, a school or a festival. In the first two years we provide the contexts, and in the third and fourth years you increasingly make your own choices. In this way, you develop into a theatre maker who knows what place they envisage for themselves in the broad field of theatre making. Throughout your course, you receive intensive study career counselling.

  • A strong basis and discovering contexts


    Year one: You start the course with an immersion in a theatre festival in Amsterdam. You see a lot of shows and talk about them. And you gain a deeper understanding of the concepts of space and time, and then experiment with them in groups. The theme of Contemporary Aesthetics in the first quarter is followed by the theme of Historical Aesthetics. You examine a historical source, link it to current events and create a performance based on that.

    In the third quarter, as part of the theme of Artist Educator in Residence, you work at a primary school for eight weeks with a group of fellow students. The basis comprises a number of theoretical ingredients: the ideas of two great thinkers. What you create together depends on the process. So rather than performing a production someone else has come up with, together you create something new based on theory and practice. The theme in the fourth quarter is Individual Artistic Research. You have received a great deal of input in the past year, and the question now is: what do you want to make and what is your research? What is your fascination and how will you tackle it?

    In the first year, you can also apply for the Honours Lab to supplement the theoretical programme of your own bachelor course.

    Year 2: The second year of Artisteducator in Theatre has the same themes as the first year, but with a different interpretation. As part of the theme of Contemporary Aesthetics, you create a performance with a community of untrained actors, for example a group of veterans or a group of people with a mental disability. This is about the question of how you can work with each other inclusively, on the basis of equality. Project WE video in collaboration with the Klare Taal theatre group.
    In the second quarter, Historical Aesthetics, you learn more about three theatre makers and choose one of them to continue working on.
    In the third quarter, the different contexts of the theatre business take centre stage. You work in a group for two weeks in three different settings, such as education, a theatre company or a socio-artistic context. For example, you set up a project in a deprived area, you learn about cultural entrepreneurship or design the programme of a school one-acter festival. In other words, you become acquainted with the entire scope of the field, helping you determine a direction for the third and fourth year.
    The fourth quarteragain centres on Individual Artistic Research. You deepen your own work and fascination in a theatre studio with excellent technical facilities. In both years, you receive study career counselling for two hours per week in a group of eight people.

  • Freedom to develop your own profile based on your own context


    The graduation phase starts in September of the third year. You start designing your future career by making choices in terms of modules, internships and your own research. In the final assessment (May year 4), you demonstrate this and show that you are ready to graduate. You influence the assessment in the 3rd and 4th years yourself. You assess yourself, you ask experts to write feedback on how you are doing. We do still give feedback on the content of your assignments, but your credits ECTS do not depend on them. You are called on to demonstrate ownership: you dare to look at yourself and love being independent.

    The third year of the Artisteducator in Theatre bachelor's course in Arnhem begins with writing a bachelor's research plan, which outlines where you stand, what choices you want to make in the second half of your course and why. In the third and fourth years you produce at least one performance, conduct research and work on the skills and personal style you need in order to work with and teach groups.

    You also do various internships, of which two are compulsory: a teaching internship and an interdisciplinary internship together with students from the Artisteducator in Dance and Fine Art & Design in Education courses. This internship can be done anywhere in the Netherlands, for example in an asylum seekers' centre or a prison, at a theatre company or in a museum. Besides these two internships, you can also choose to do internships within institutions focusing on art education, or a more in-depth internship abroad or an internship within which you explore your own research question in the professional field. In the fourth year, your own research culminates in an essay. That research can be linked to an internship.

    In the fourth year, your own research culminates in an essay. That research can be linked to an internship.  

    There is also plenty of scope for your own input: we offer eight modules, from which you choose two. Examples of modules are ‘Activism and compassionate theatre’, ‘Ex nihilo’ (creating from scratch), ‘Biographical theatre making’ and ‘Fusion’ (experimenting and creating a performance with different cultural forms). The content of the modules changes annually. You can also choose to do an additional internship instead of a module.

    All fourth-year students of the Artisteducator in Theatre course perform their graduation projects during the ArtEZ finals.

    Discover the most recent cohort

    Ruben van den Aardweg is telling about his finals

During the course, there are five central themes

  • Urgency
  • Connection
  • Artistry
  • Ownership
  • Enquiring attitude

Experiencing international context

International orientation is important, because it means you are presented with different contexts, so you are encouraged to do part of your course abroad. For instance, this coming year we will be going to Belfast for an 8-week elective module to experience the context there and to work in different communities. Sometimes a student chooses to study abroad for six months (Surinam, Uganda). We encourage students to develop and maintain international contacts.

Assessment

Your lecturers work in teams rather than individually. The interesting thing about this is that you don’t get a grade. We test and assess in the round; there is no single lecturer with individual responsibility for an assessment, and the team assesses your portfolio of completed assignments jointly. This results in a more reliable form of assessment.

Study in Arnhem

Arnhem stands for green, creativity and enterpreneurship. As a student city, it literally offers space for many different initiatives. 

More aboute studying in Arnhem

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