Designed for the individual ‘auteur’, the course provides a laboratory for the study of – and experiments in – performance, enabling both practical and conceptual work and connection with appropriate innovative work in other professional environments.
Students are part of a thriving community of postgraduate scholars and practitioners working within a School-wide framework for postgraduate research and experimentation. Within this course you will be invited to interrogate, test and apply the most recent thinking and practices within your particular field. You will then be encouraged to explore, experiment and innovate by developing your own contemporary performance practice(s), whilst conducting your own research into performance, pushing the boundaries within your chosen field. Throughout, emphasis will be placed on process through a mutually interdependent relationship between theory and practice.
On this course the production and making of performance is seen not only as an opportunity to experiment, but also as a process through which academic research might be undertaken. Whether you are a director, choreographer, performer, visual artist, composer, producer or designer, you will be invited to engage with new forms and apply established techniques in innovative ways.
The course values the particular skills and personal proposals that individual students bring to it. The interests that you and your peers express will help shape the timetable and content of course units, some of which will be undertaken with students of other specialist postgraduate courses. The course also draws on Central’s contacts with organisations and practitioners engaged in the development of new work and innovative practices within the performance industries.
During your year at Central you might expect to:
- participate in workshops and seminars to investigate the relationship between the concepts and materials of performance
- analyse making, performing and spectatorship as interrelated activities
- learn about critical contexts and concepts
- explore different strategies and methods for doing research and disseminating the findings, all leading towards a conference presentation
- undertake laboratory exploration of performance practice as a way of testing out your ideas
- develop your own work towards a presentation on an appropriate platform within Central’s curated season of public festivals, colloquia and productions
- undertake a sustained individual project (SIP)culminating in a dissertation of 12,000 words, or a portfolio documenting practice-based research of equivalent weight.
Thereafter many students on completion of the course extend and deepen their studies at PhD level or enter the industry as innovators in their fields.
