What is Performing and Applied Arts?

Performing and applied arts (PART) at Beloit College is an interdisciplinary major that brings together music, theatre, dance, design, and production. It’s about performance, and it’s about creation, collaboration, and using artistic skills to make meaningful work. Through theory, history, and practice, students learn how to build performances, design productions, and apply creative techniques with purpose.

Beloit College’s program encourages risk-taking, experimentation, and “learning by doing.” Whether you focus on movement, sound, set, costume, or storytelling, you will develop as an artist who understands how to make art, and why it matters in social, cultural, and global contexts.

Why study Performing and Applied Arts?

If your passion lies in making things move, sound, or resonate, this major gives you the professional tools. You’ll develop technical skills in performance and production, and build the conceptual frameworks to reflect on what you’re creating. It’s ideal for students who want to perform, design, or produce, and who want to think critically about how performance shapes, and is shaped, by society.

Students graduate with creative confidence and career-ready skills that translate far beyond the stage or studio. With a performing and applied arts degree, you’re prepared for careers in performance, theatre production, arts management, design, choreography, and applied performance projects that combine community engagement, activism, and storytelling. You leave with both artistic skill and professional adaptability.

Why study Performing and Applied Arts at Beloit College?

Performing and applied arts at Beloit College gives you the creative training you expect and the professional skills you might not realize the arts can teach. Through hands-on projects and ensemble work in theatre, dance, music, design, and multimedia work, you learn how to manage complex projects, set schedules, plan effectively, analyze challenges, and communicate with clarity. You will grow as a collaborator who knows how to build a team, offer constructive feedback, and work with empathy. With close faculty mentoring, you will turn creative ideas into meaningful, real-world results.

You will develop strong composition and communication skills that matter far beyond the arts. Students learn how to communicate ideas through image, movement, text, and sound, how to shape creative concepts and carry them through to completion, and how to use rhythm and structure to create meaning. What you learn at Beloit College will enable you to engage in your creative practice with the confidence to take risks and make discoveries. These skills are the foundation of success for future educators, litigators, journalists, psychologists, advertising creatives, broadcasters, and entrepreneurs.

At Beloit College, you belong to an active community of makers. You can perform in the Hendricks Center for the Arts, collaborate in ensemble work, join jam sessions and concerts, design for the stage, build sets, experiment with lighting and sound, and imagine new ways to communicate the experiences of being human. This is a place where you can grow as an artist and as a leader, supported by faculty who know how to help you connect your creative training to your future.