Earlier this month, leading industry magazine, The Stage, interviewed Ged Stephenson, Section Leader for Performing Arts and Musical Theatre....

The highly resourced Wessex Academy of Performing Arts fosters independent creativity while remaining focused on equipping students for getting work.

"The overriding ethos is employment. We're training students not just for the profession, but to be employable and to exist and survive as a professional long after they have graduated." Ged Stephenson, section leader for performing arts and musical theatre at the Wessex Academy of Performing Arts, is clear about the advantages of training: "Too many young performers are being told the only way to succeed is to move to London and get an agent. but if you want to work - and work creatively - why jump into that overcrowded market without the right preparation?" 

Located in Weston-super-Mare, Wessex Academy offers two BA (hons) and two foundation degree courses, all accredited by Bath Spa University, in performing arts and musical theatre. Currently, it has a student population of 120 drawn from the UK and abroad, all of whom can expect to experience a flexible and wide-ranging approach to learning that also gives them opportunities unmatched elsewhere. 

Stephenson recognises - and the course celebrates - the reality that "students want to be creative, imaginative and do exciting work". And, he argues, Wessex Academy is best suited to realising those ambitions with its imaginative approach to theatre, making, its dual emphasis on performance and musical theatre and its commitment to innovation. 

"London is not the only place to achieve your ambitions. The industry is bigger - and demand for talent is wider - than just London. You can find work and, just as importantly, you can create work in Weston that you couldn't elsewhere." 

With a wide array of theatres, arts centres and unconventional performance spaces on Weston-super-Mare's doorstep, resources at the college are also generous and plentiful, with 12 studios including dedicated theatre, singing, dance and recording spaces alongside a rehearsal room, two 'black box' performance space and the 207-seat Blakehay Theatre (which this year underwent a £1 million refurbishment) ably servicing students' needs. 

Just as plentiful are the opportunities available. The curriculum covers theorists of the past and practitioners in the present. This runs throughout the three years of the course, and is succinctly described by Stephenson as "a crash course in how we got from performance as ritual in the past to the stylistic pluralism of today. It is matched by an emphasis on flexibility. 

"In the second year of performing arts, students take a module called 'performance event', in the third year 'independent practice' - where they explore a range of genres and practitioners before selecting an area to specialise in and develop their own shows."

Third-year students form their own theatre company "and they do two national, sometimes international tours (in recent years, to Poland, Austria and Germany) offering shows and workshops they have created themselves. They also present a contemporary performance festival in which student give solo performances based on the genre of a particular theatre practitioner or theorist."

Here, adds Stephenson, the focus is on equipping students to develop workshops and classes alongside touring productions to make a more enticing proposition for bookers and venue managers.

Four such companies are in operation during the current year, all of which can tap into a long-established infrastructure between the college and local arts organisations for help and support if the students decide to continue the company after the graduate.

As well as producing traditional shows (Into the Woods last year, Stepping Out this year) final-year musical theatre students are encouraged to create new work in collaboration with the London-based Mercury Musical Developments promoting new writers in the genre to create entirely new shows.

Earlier this year, Wessex students collaborated with American counterparts in Las Vegas to present a simultaneous internet-linked performance called Time-Lapse. This used cutting-edge technology to marry the two companies' contributions without any time delay, despite the more than 5,000 miles separating them.

Digital technology is also playing a key role in a current student project that marries puppetry and iPads, while others - including a one-man show, with the student actor in a nearby forest, and a multi-performer piece in which students were dispersed throughout the town - made use of connected Smartphones to interact with the audience and determine actions and outcomes. 

There's also a module on professional practice - "everything from how to raise money, forming a company, creating a website and social network presence to managing your accounts and how to do your VAT returns" - to inculcate in students a valuable business sense alongside their artistic ambition.

Those stepping out on their own leave the academy with advice on auditioning, how to present themselves so they stand out, the right way to approach agents an, no less crucial, a purpose-made showreel that shows off their skills and talent to the best.

All of which amounts to a unique offering to potential students keen to work and learn in an imaginative, independent-minded environment in which the needs of the individual performer are squarely at the centre of things.

"Once our students walk through that door for an audition," Stephenson proudly adds, "they generally get it".