MA Contemporary Theatre Making

Guildford School of Acting

Bachelors degree (first or 2.1) in a relevant field, as well as previous engagement with drama, theatre and performance. Applicants without a Bachelors degree who can demonstrate relevant experience at the appropriate standard will also be considered. Suitable applicants will be called to interview and participate in a collaborative activity appropriate to their discipline. Overseas candidates will in most cases be assessed remotely and through evidence of the ability to work collaboratively.

English language requirements

IELTS minimum overall: 6.5

IELTS minimum by component: 6.0

All fees are subject to increase or review for subsequent academic years. Please note that not all visa routes permit part-time study and overseas students entering the UK on a Tier 4 visa will not be permitted to study on a part-time basis.

Compulsory Modules

• The Artist as Researcher
• Facilitating Creativity: Contemporary Theatre Practices
• Body
• Space: Stage and Site
• The Researcher as Practitioner
• Technology
• Audience
• Text
• Project and Portfolio

Module Overview

You will study eight 15-credit modules and, for a Masters qualification, the Project and Portfolio module, which develops a range of work appropriate to a professional and contemporary practice portfolio.

Modules

The Artist as Researcher

This module introduces you to the interrelated activities of research, reflection, and artistry. It facilitates an approach to the pragmatics of theatre making that is grounded in a spirit of enquiry, focused investigation and concrete realisation. It offers a set of tools and approaches for contemporary theatre making, and provides a way of bringing together students’ work – and the discourses that surround that work – across the programme. The module is designed to work in conjunction with the Semester 2 module, The Researcher as Practitioner, to form a ‘spine’ for the programme as a whole.

Facilitating Creativity: Contemporary Theatre Practices

This module is designed to contextualise current theatre making practices and scrutinise systematic models of creative production. It addresses four main areas of consideration:

• Principles of creativity, and ways of developing and enhancing creativity in theatre making
• Specific theatre making processes as exemplified by significant companies and practitioners in the field of contemporary theatre and performance
• The procedures by which theatre practice on the programme will be realised
• Your own individual skillset, aptitudes, needs and aims as a creative practitioner

Body

This module asks you to consider how performance is embodied. It explores the role of the body as a fundamental element of stagecraft, inquiring after the performing body as a carrier of meaning(s), a marker (and measure) of ‘liveness’, and a core facet of our encounter with performance.

You will combine critical reading on the performing body and embodiment with intensive studio-based work exploring these topics. The module, along with the modules entitled Space, Technology, Audience and Text, includes contextual study, case study and practice-based research that entails the presentation of showings.

Space: Stage and Site

This module reflects on moves from the conventional theatre stage to site-specific performance and performative space. It considers the practices that are shifting perceptions of space in performance and in writings on performance and culture. You are encouraged to discover approaches to existing and imagined spaces in your own practical work and in reflecting upon emerging ideas on the significance of space for your own artistic practice.

The Researcher as Practitioner

This module builds on the Semester 1 module The Artist as Researcher. Through the interrelated activities of research and reflection, collaborative practice and individual work, it explores methods of refining and developing a practice-research question, through to conceiving, planning and presenting a specific performance project. The module includes self-reflection tasks, case studies, collaborative work, student presentations and feedback sessions. It therefore exercises the analytical, organisational and communication skills necessary in pitching ideas, planning enquiry-led projects and formulating coherent proposals for contemporary theatre practice.

Technology

This module explores the use of technology in contemporary theatre making. It addresses the relationship between technologies of (re)presentation and the realization of theatre productions. It considers in particular the use of media technologies in contemporary performance, whereby stages and staging are opened up to screen spaces and images, digitally-enabled sound and music, and performance presented through new distribution platforms. It addresses challenges and opportunities for theatre-making as a live and embodied activity in a realm of digital cultural production.

Audience

This module explores ways in which ‘the audience’ is a core element of theatre making.  It asks you to investigate the audience – or, more precisely, audiences – as not just a buyer of tickets and receiver of images and ideas, but as an active element of theatrical practice. It also considers the increasing tendency in contemporary theatre to involve audiences as participants within performance in different ways.

Text

This module focuses on the ways in which texts are created and generated, devised and documented, scribed and scored within contemporary theatre making processes. Centred on the interrogation of text and authorship in theatre practice, you will study a variety of textual approaches innate to theatre and performance innovation. The module also considers ‘text’ in a more semantic sense. What does the text ‘mean’, what does it argue for or dramatise, what sort of discourse does it convey? These questions may apply even without dialogue or utterance, if each performance event in itself is a ‘text’.

Project and Portfolio

This module involves you in advanced study and creative realisation. The module has two strands. In the ‘Project’ strand, you work in self-managed groups to conceive, develop, rehearse and present a piece of theatre (or an artefact that is grounded in theatre and performance). In the ‘Portfolio’ strand, you work independently to: reflect upon the principles, process and outcome of your practice project; analyse a particular aspect of contemporary theatre making; present a case study of an influential or significant company or practitioner; and assess your own development and professional plan for ongoing work.