The Drama and Performance Studies department is located at the bottom of Jubilee Gardens on the university’s Howard College campus.

[Map]

Facilities

The Drama and Performance Studies department comprises 7 buildings, including offices, tutorial venues, a seminar room, a lecture venue, and three theatre spaces.

The department houses

• The Square Space Theatre – an intimate experimental black box theatre with movable seating
• Studio 5 Theatre – an intimate steeply raked proscenium-style space
• The Pieter Scholtz Open Air Theatre – an outdoor arena space, named after the second head of the Drama and Performance Studies department.

The department also continues to have access to the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre, which opened in 1981, and is appropriately named after the founder of the Drama department, Professor Elizabeth Sneddon, the culmination of whose dream the building of the theatre was.  The Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre has become one of the most cherished and important theatre spaces in Durban and continues to provide a space for the presentation of the work of the Drama and Performance Studies programme.

The department also boasts

• a departmental research library holding the Florence Powell Collection, which students may use on site for their research;
• a dedicated LAN for postgraduate drama students located next to the departmental library;
• the Pieter-Dirk Uys archive;
• the Jock Leyden archive;
• a large wardrobe with thousands of costumes that are utilized in productions, in teaching, and are also rented out;
• a fully functional workshop in which the sets for productions are built;
• a properties room housing thousands of objects used in productions and in teaching;
• a dance studio with a sprung floor, which houses the Flatfoot Training Company and is used for dance projects.