The MA Contemporary Performance course encourages students to engage with a broad range of theoretical and practical approaches to ‘performance making’. This course is not exclusively for graduates of courses in acting, drama, or performance studies; we welcome students from backgrounds of study in the arts or science, as this is not specifically an actor training, but an opportunity to explore performativity from an individual or collaborative perspective. The course appeals to students who are inspired by engagement with a diverse range of performance possibilities including live art, digital, post-text, and radical theatre practice but can also be used to question how classical theatrical methodologies might interact with twenty-first century aesthetics.

Theatre and ‘performance making’ is a mechanism through which artists reflect, describe, and challenge, cultural, political and social hegemony. The Contemporary Performance course supports you to both question and develop your practice and offers a critical and theoretical context in which to locate it.  We ask you to reflect on what platforms, and through which media performance takes place.  During your studies you might wish to consider issues relating to technology and delivery through mediated representations (video-mapping, new cinema, social networking); follow a shamanistic, anthropological, spiritual, route of self-discovery; create a guerrilla series of interventions through flash-mobbing, or look at audience interactivity using live-gaming.  You may wish to investigate considerations relating to the performativity of gender, sexuality, faith, nationality, or ethnicity; or you might be inspired by interrogating the relationship between the performer and the phenomenological aspects of theatrical representation, lighting, properties, costume, sound.  Whatever approach you take the course will encourage you to take into account issues of spatial dynamics through site-specificity, or site sensitivity, defining performance ‘space’ through visible or invisible limens (the markers defining performance ‘territory’). The programme of study within this course operates as an ‘andragogical’ partnership, through which students are supported to define their own journeys alongside their subject specialist supervisor.

Students are facilitated to work with students and staff from across the breadth of MA disciplines as the Master’s framework encourages a collaborative and inter-disciplinary approaches to study.  If your intention is to become an independent performance-maker, director, theorist, critic or dramaturge, then this course provides an exciting and demanding option within the Master’s structure, nurturing experimentation and innovation, and valuing the unique contribution which each individual can bring to a discipline in which one’s art is often oneself.