Course description
Course Details
The MA programme centres on the integration of creative performing arts with digital technologies to develop students' skills to advanced levels and to equip them with the expertise to contribute to, as well as respond to, the rapidly changing performing arts and creative industries. It draws on the significant academic, creative and technological strengths from both Schools, and as having a high degree of currency and interdisciplinarity, and an emphasis on employability.
The developments in technology of the last ten years have seen a variety of innovations in the field of performing arts.
Modules (all core)
* Research Methodologies
Main topics of study: bibliographic searches, referencing, application and understanding of research tools; the historical, social and cross-cultural context of performance research; the impact of multi-media and new technology theatricality and performance practice; the use of body, space and technology in creation process; the interrogation of traditional boundaries in performance making;
research methodologies of various forms and styles of performance practice; discourses of performance creativity; economic and cultural/political control (gate-keeping) of performance creativity; the impact of internationalism, globalise and localism on theatre creativity.
* Practices and Strategies
Main topics of study: multimedia live theatre and dance practices; design strategies and models; motion sensing and motion capture scapture - converting gestures and movement to data; sound, place and text; interactive systems for performance; telematics and distributed performance; video editing and image manipulation software.
* Historical and Critical Contexts
Main topics of study: the history of performance's use of technologies from ancient to modern times; the history of digital performance in the mid/late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; critical theories surrounding digital performance
* Body, Space and Technology
Main topics of study: formulating ideas for a digital performance project; evaluating the specific parameters of a given technique and the impact it has on performance; planning a performance using digital technology; exploring theoretical and practical issues arising out of the project process; testing out ideas in workshops and seminars with peers and tutors.
* Dissertation
You will undertake a substantial independent research investigation by means of either a major practical digital performance project, accompanied by a written critical evaluation or through the writing of a dissertation around a topic or issue within the field as agreed with the module leader.
Special Features
* Graduates from the programme will be expert researchers and analysers of the field, and will be skilled initiators and producers of their own original digital performance work, participating in the development of new modes of cultural and artistic practices.
* Cross-media integration and the development of a range of creative, technological and advanced software skills is emphasised, including 'cutting-edge' areas such as inter-personal wearable and corporal sensor/actuator technologies, reactive and sensitive environments, and communication and networked social environments.
Careers
Technologically skilled and artistically informed graduates are in demand from a range of employers from major companies such as the BBC and EMI and large theatres such as the Barbican and Sadlers Wells, to leading art galleries such as the Baltic and the ICA, and small/medium size performance and production companies. Further new fields are emerging involving communication and relational technologies developed by companies such as Sony-Ericsson and Nokia, as well as intelligent artefacts and environments developed across a wide range of industries, demanding an increasing emphasis on qualitative parameters of experience and participation. These changes are impacting across many parts of society, and an expanding field of creative enterprise is growing that requires artist-engineers and performance-oriented designers who are literate in the creative conditions and processes that constitute the research, development and production condition of the emergent field.
