Subject Overview

Dance is a powerful and expressive subject which encourages students to develop their creative, physical, emotional, and intellectual capacity. This dance course recognises the role of dance in young people’s lives and provides current and exciting opportunities that enable students to explore and perform a variety of dance styles and themes at a deeper level. This course also provides students with the basic understanding of concepts, such production planning, business and marketing tools, pitching and promoting and evaluating and reviewing performances, building a solid grounding of skills to prepare them for a career in the Performing Arts industry. 

Students opting for this course must be prepared and confident to perform in front of a live audience. 

Course Information and Assessment

Unit 1: Performing – Controlled assessment: 30% (Practical and Written) 

This unit enables learners to gain an understanding of the skills and techniques needed to reproduce an existing piece(s) of professional work, in the style of Musical Theatre. They will research the style and take part in the rehearsal process in order to reproduce the work to a professional standard. Students will also be required to include an element of acting in the performance. (This can be one line of spoken text). They will then perform to a live audience, receive feedback and write a written performance reflection. 

Unit 2: Creating – Controlled assessment: 30% (Practical and Written) 

This unit is set by the exam board and enables learners to gain and demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the skills needed to create and refine original choreography. They will be given a theme and be required to create their own group choreography in response. They will take ownership of all creative decisions such as props, scenery, costume, lighting, sound and choreography.  

Unit 3: Performing Arts in Practice – External controlled assessment: 40% (Written) 

This unit introduces learners to areas of the performing arts that need to be considered when responding to an industry commission. They will work to a brief to plan a performance. They will gain an understanding of the business and management sector of the performing arts industry and be required to plan performance work, promote and pitch and then evaluate and reflect. 

This course has no written exam. 

Progression

This course allows students to be prepared to study dance, musical theatre, or performing arts at Level 3 in their post-16 studies through a variety of academic, vocational, work-based, and theatre-based opportunities.