What will you study?
The curriculum, which also supports awards a Postgraduate Certificate and Postgraduate Diploma levels, is designed to focus on developing artists' abilities and capacities for professional, vocational and academic innovation. We emphasise relationships between composition, reflection, practice and documentation across a dynamic range of performance disciplines and discourses.
This degree is structured to enable students who already have some experience of performance practice to expand their artistic horizons, develop their reflective abilities and expand their portfolio as thinking practitioners. You will follow two strands of modules through the programme:
Reflective Practice
This strand, consisting of two 40-credit practice-based modules, is designed to enhance your abilities as a self-reflective practitioner. It recognises the deep interrelationship between reflection, documentation and production, both in terms of the development of an artists' work and in terms of the work's critical and public dissemination. You will be introduced to the variety of ways in which composition, creation and production in performance has evolved in the 20th and 21st centuries. This will be accompanied by investigation into documentary and reflective strategies. This module strand will be primarily focused around your own practice, and put into context by looking at various key practitioners, modes or theories.
Creativity & Knowledge
This strand, consisting of two 20-credit modules, is designed to deepen and broaden your understanding of the interrelationship between arts practice, knowledge and research. It will consist of investigation into concepts of practice-based research in the arts and the examination of the implications of the widening of traditional concepts of research. The modules will also interrogate, through workshop-based practice, the possibilities for the generation and communication of knowledge in and through practice. The modules will draw on both your own practice, being undertaken in the Reflective Practice strand, and upon the work of key practitioners and theorists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Masters Independent Project
Together these taught elements will lead you into the final Independent Project module, where you will undertake an extended period of supervised practice-based research. You will be expected to draw together and use the resources provided to you earlier in the programme.
How can you study?
You can study the MA programme:
Full-time:
Over one year
Part-time:
Up to five years' duration
The programme begins in September each year. The taught modules will normally consist of weekly sessions scheduled on one day a week, with full-time candidates attending the whole day, part-time students for half the day. There may also be the occasional intensive weekend session.
Will you be interviewed?
For all candidates there will be an interview and consideration of a portfolio of work. Arrangements for interview by telephone for overseas students are possible where appropriate although all candidates are encouraged to attend for interview in person wherever possible.