BA (Hons) Acting

Home / Study at NUA / Courses / BA (Hons) Acting

BA (Hons) Acting

BA (Hons) Acting at Norwich University of the Arts (Norwich) offers an unparalleled creative environment for the actor in the United Kingdom.

As an actor at Norwich, you will not only be expertly trained as a performance artist who serves to represent the human condition within the roles you play, but also as an individual practitioner able to create your own work across a myriad of artistic disciplines and media.

For BA (Hons) Acting we are not only concerned with ‘how’ to act but we also question what acting as a discipline ‘does’ and explore new possibilities for the craft as we engage across various media, styles and forms.

Personal toolkit of skills

Joining the BA (Hons) Acting course enables you to perform in a variety of situations and be equipped to go into many areas of film, television, radio and digital media, and work across several platforms.

You will become an instigator and facilitator of future trends and developments in your field. Our course has been designed to build on your existing skills, not just in acting, but also to acquire transferable skills of research, critical thinking and independent study.

As you explore embodied live performance you will be encouraged to experiment with different live and recorded settings and gain skills across various mediated technologies through sound and camera work.

Master performance techniques

You will graduate with your own personal toolkit of skills, learned as part of a hybrid delivery — in the studio and digitally through diverse acting training methods such as those of Batson, Chekhov, Hagen, Meisner and Stanislavsky and the voice training practices of Berry, Bryon, Linklater and Rodenberg.

The embodied performance training at Norwich integrates voice, movement and acting, examining practices that are designed to aid you to access your full emotional and creative instrument.

Alongside this intensive training, you will be encouraged to explore and experiment across different live and recorded contexts while gaining skills across various mediated technologies through sound and camera work.

You will collaborate with our other screen-based courses in film, animation, visual effects and games while you develop your own links with industry in line with your chosen career trajectory.

Career preparation

Professional development is an important aspect of all courses at Norwich and is taught throughout your studies. By your final year, your professional preparation will be tailored to your preferred career path. For Acting this will include:

Headshots
CV writing
Audition and interview skills
Website development
Grant writing skills
Networking
Showreel

See our graduating class of 2023

As a trained actor graduating from this rich environment, you will be well placed to not only get work as an actor within more conventional contexts such as stage, film and TV, but you will also be equipped to create new work innovating performance practice(s) at the edges of the specialism.

The transferable skills and stage craft you will acquire will open a range of career opportunities within the acting profession and wider industry, where communication skills are in high demand.

Typical career paths include:

Actor
Performance Artist
Researcher
Personal Assistant
Sales and marketing
Promotional work
Modelling

You’ll also get specialist creative careers advice from our Business and Employability Team to help support you as you plan your career.

Course information

Institution code: N39
Course UCAS code: W410
Course length: 3 years
Sandwich courses: Creative Professional Development (1 year, Level 5 diploma), or Creative Computing (1 year, Level 5 diploma), available between years 2 & 3

All courses run as a blend of on-campus and digital teaching and learning, and follow current UK government safety advice. Applicants and students will be notified directly if any changes need to be made.

Book an open day

Order a prospectus

Course Content

Year 1
Introduction to core skills and concepts of acting
Working from self with workshops in voice and movement for acting
Introduction to skills for scene study, voice overs, and film
Introduction to text analysis, character work and animal work
Contextual study relevant to practical work

Year 2
Advancing core skills and concepts of acting
Working with various acting techniques across contemporary digital contexts
Working across disciplines in collaboration with other courses
Showreel and industry development
Masterclasses in movement, voice, and specialised techniques such as stage fighting
Advanced Contextual study relevant to practical work

Year 3
Professional Preparation for career and employability
Masterclasses in acting for various applications
Industry engagement
Showreel, headshots and website as appropriate to chosen career path
Final research project
Public performance as part of final project

Student work

Tap to expand

- An actor with dramatically drawn on eyebrows and tears, looks up sadly. They are covered in what looks like cake and jam, and have a pacifier in their mouth

- A group of four pull the arms of an actor kneeling on the floor, the performer has paint on their arms and face

- One actor stands over another, who is laying on the floor with paint on their belly arms and face, they look like they have been knocked to the floor and they don't trust the other actor to help them up

- An actor in modest black underwear sits on a white chair in a room with white backdrop and white fabric on the floor, holding an open pocket watch in one hand, and what looks like a heart in the other. They are blindfolded with white fabric and have the bloom of a large red rose covering the lower half of their face, as though planted in their mouth. The scene is behind a layer of something transparent like glass, and you can see the reflection of people in the background of the room watching

- Someone in a white overalls looking at a mock crime scene photo on a projected screen, where more people in overalls lay dramatically strewn across a white sheet. The sheet and the people in the image are all covered in footsteps of colourful paint

- Actors in brown togas with animal prints headbands and wristbands embrace around someone holding a spear upright

- Figures under purple light wearing eerie masks

BA Acting - Acting student siting on a white chair in a teaching space in our Duke Street Riverside building.

BA Acting - Acting students doing workshop exercises

- A group of people wearing white coveralls and white gloves stand in a circle with their hands in the middle, palms facing up, covered in red

BA Acting - Acting students doing trust falls

BA Acting - Masks laid out on the floor with emotional faces

BA Acting - Acting students rehearsing from scripts

- A figure under bright purple light, is taped to a surface of tabloid newspapers wearing an expressionless mask which has a mobile phone fixed over the eyes

- Someone with orange coveralls and a racing helmet sits on a dark stage, backdropped with a huge screen showing a grid with various scenes from a formula one race

- A student wearing white sneakers, white trousers, and a white shirt with handwritten statements on, places sticky-notes on the body of a mannequin

Entry requirements
Fees & funding
Level 5 Diplomas

A / AS Levels – GCE
GCE A/AS Levels 3 A-level qualifications at grades BBB. Where candidates are not taking 3 A-levels, NUA will consider combinations of A-level/AS-level and other Level 3 qualifications.

BTEC Extended Diploma (QCF or RQF)
Distinction, Merit, Merit in an art, design or media related subject

BTEC Diploma (QCF or RQF)
Distinction*, Distinction* in an art, design or media related subject

T Levels
A T Level in any subject with overall grade Merit or above

Access to Higher Education Diploma
Pass

International Baccalaureate Diploma
A minimum of 27 points

NUA welcomes applicants of all ages from all backgrounds. Your application will be primarily assessed through interview and audition so even if you have no formal qualifications or do not meet our typical offers it can still be worth applying.

If you are studying at the time of your application and your audition is successful, it is likely that you will receive a conditional offer.

If the qualification that you are studying is not shown, do not worry as we are able to accept other pre-entry qualifications as well as combinations of different qualifications. Please do contact our Student Recruitment Team if you have any queries.

2023/24 University fees for new entrants

NUA will assess students’ tuition fee status using the guidance provided by the UK Council for International Student Affairs

Students from the UK or Ireland and EU students with ‘Settled’ or ‘Pre-Settled’ status will be charged ‘Home’ fees if they meet the relevant residency requirements. They will usually be eligible for a tuition fee loan from the UK government, meaning that they won’t have to pay NUA’s tuition fees upfront.

Students who do not meet the necessary residency requirements will usually be charged ‘Overseas’ fees and will not be eligible for the UK government tuition fee loan. Since 2021/22, this includes new entrants from the EU, EEA, and Switzerland who do not have ‘Settled’ or ‘Pre-Settled’ status, because the UK has now formally left the EU.

Fee status	Course	Annual fee
Home	Undergraduate degree (full-time three and four year degree)	£9,250
Overseas	Undergraduate degree (full-time three and four year degree)	£18,000

For Home undergraduate students starting in 2023, inflation may be applied to your fees in later years, if the UK government were to increase the fee cap beyond the current limit of £9,250 per year. If such an increase were to apply, we would confirm this in advance to you of each academic year, and we would limit the increase to the maximum allowed by the Office for Students.

For Overseas undergraduate students starting in 2023, inflation will be applied to your fees in later years. We will confirm this in advance to you of each academic year, and we will limit the increase to no more than the Office for Students’ recommended inflationary measure, which is RPI-X. RPI-X is calculated by the Office for Budget Responsibility. In setting fees for the following year, we will use the Office for Budget Responsibility’s RPI-X forecast for quarter 3 of the relevant year.

See our Fees and Funding page for further information which is also available in a downloadable format.

Financial support for UK students in 2023

Tuition fee loans and loans for living costs are usually available to UK and some EU students, as well as non-repayable NUA bursaries based on family income. Find out more about applying for funding.

All students have an opportunity to spend a year, between the second and third year of their course, enhancing their employability options through a Level 5 Diploma.

These courses are offered in Creative Professional Development; a structured programme of input sessions and work-based learning, and Creative Computing; designed to build the foundation skills in coding and software design that are in high demand in the digital and creative industries.