Course description
Admissions Process
Suitable applicants will be invited to attend a practical workshop. International applicants or those unable to attend a workshop will be required to submit video/DVD evidence of their physical capacity along with appropriate supporting material. All applicants will be required to undertake an interview in person or by phone.
Introduction
The MA is taught in the recently developed Milton Building, which contains architecturally inspirational studio spaces and writing rooms. The recent subject review commented upon the 'excellent facilities - both aesthetic and practical' and the 'theme of creativity across all levels and modules of the courses' as well as the 'committed team of staff with a clear shared ethos'.
This course offers you the opportunity to undertake a training process combining personal physical development with an exploration of the dynamics of ensemble performance. The course contains a period of full-time psychophysical training influenced by techniques developed by Grotowski, Barba and Nunez, but without attempting to reproduce their methods. The training will be based on a combination of improvised and fixed training structures developed by Course Leader John Britton and will be supplemented by alternate vocal and physical training approaches, allowing you to develop a sophisticated understanding of the theoretical and practical demands of training for performance.
You will then develop your training through the process of rehearsing and performing a piece of tutordirected ensemble physical theatre. Subsequently you will work online to reflect on your work, research and analyse historical and theoretical contexts for ensemble physical theatre and, finally, to develop an individual project which can focus on performance, theoretical or pedagogical questions.
Course Structure
This programme operates an unique structure, designed in response to the needs of both home and international students. Whilst you will register at the University for a 48-week period, you will be required to be on-site only for the period June - October. After that period all work can be pursued through the University?s online learning environment.
Modules:
Core Training is delivered through six weeks of morning classes, comprising a process of engagement with and development through key basal areas of pre performative training. Key elements of this work include complicity, concentration, energy, pleasure and impulse. The work is physically and concentrationally challenging.
Contextual Training is delivered over the same six-week period - taught during the afternoons, with every third week left free for reflection, research and individual and group seminars. This module offers you alternative perspectives on the process of psychophysical training helping you to contextualise and deepen the learning encountered in Core Training.
Ensemble Physical Theatre will involve translating the experiences and understandings of the first block of teaching into the process of rehearsing and performing a piece of ensemble physical theatre. It involves the application of training disciplines to the rehearsal and performance process. The production is tutor directed with responsibility for the maintaining of training shared between the tutor and students.
Theoretical Frameworks offers you a series of online study tasks which require you to engage in greater depth and with greater complexity in the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of psychophysical and ensemble practice. Students work individually and in online study groups, maintaining contact through processes of shared learning tasks, discussion boards, collective bibliographies and other such tasks.
Independent Study is a negotiated task which allows you to focus on an area of the MA which best reflects your career aspirations. The study addresses a substantive question of practical, pedagogical or conceptual relevance to work encountered during the preceding four modules. You negotiate an appropriate outcome for this study, including performed, written, filmed or an outcome that involves a teaching/workshop facilitation process. The School offers bursaries towards the cost of MA and MMus courses.
