Objectives
This leading postgraduate programme in Dance Studies offers a wide range of specialisms which reflect the Department's varied portfolio of teaching and research interests. As a programme, it provides students with challenging and culturally varied opportunities to build on academic qualifications and dance experience, as well as the chance to extend knowledge and understanding of dance through practice. Professional development of the dance graduate is an optional area of exploration, and individual placements are provided for students, along with seminar-based learning. Graduates have gone on to careers in teaching, administration, journalism and choreography. The programme also provides students with the requisite research training and skills for subsequent doctoral study. The content of the programme, which is based in a Department with a well-established national and international reputation, will provide students from diverse dance backgrounds with rich opportunities to discuss and share ideas in both practical and theoretical contexts, thus building further on their dance knowledge. In the Autumn semester, students are required to study two core modules that provide the theoretical and methodological foundation: Politicising Practice; Performing Theories. In the Spring semester, students will then be able to choose from a list of optional modules that include: Site-Specific Dance; Post-Classical Forms; Popular Dance; Culture, Power and Difference in the Performing Arts; Laban Movement Analysis. During the summer period, students write a dissertation on an approved subject of their choice.
Course description
MSc/PGDip in Dance Cultures, Histories and Practices Module overview
Modules are reviewed on an annual basis and may be subject to change. The following list gives examples of the types of modules you may study on this programme.
Performing Theories
This module explores the roles, positions and functions of authorial voices, texts and readers as employed in writing and dancing. It investigates concepts and practices, such as translation, reconstruction, reinvention, in the creation of writing and dancing, and engages critically with circular interchanges between practice and theory deployed by dance artists, practitioners and scholars.
Politicising Practice
This module examines the dancing body and the institutional frameworks that both shape and are shaped by it. It considers the interplay of cultures, histories and politics in twenty-first-century dance production and practices, and seeks to develop a complex understanding of theoretical models that investigate the construction of the body as a strategy to analyse movement practice.
Culture, Power and Difference in the Performing Arts
This module examines a range of dance practices that have been represented as 'cultural' forms, situating their 'cultural' identity in relation to colonialism, nationalism, and to global political and economic forces, as well as in relation to their historical context.
Post-Classical Forms
This module provides a critical context for students to evaluate and create new work within and from codified dance genres. The module interrogates the terms classical and traditional, as applied to a range of dance forms, and questions the notion of codified choreographic and technical principles and practices as 'fixed'.
Professional Development
This module allows students to participate in a mentoring and peer-observation scheme. The scheme gives the student the opportunity to work with another practitioner and the aim is to engage with skills, processes and ideas that the student can relate to in his/her own field of work, but with the opportunity to discover and reflect upon how other industries and practitioners operate.
Popular Dance
This module addresses competing definitions of the popular, and critically explores the intellectual assumptions that underpin this categorisation. In doing so, it examines a range of popular dance practices, both in vernacular and presentational contexts, and considers how different social, political, economic and historical frameworks impact upon their production, distribution and consumption.
Programme length
12 months full-time, 24 or 36 months part-time
