MA Theatre Directing

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Performing Arts

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Fees and Funding

Here's the fees and funding information for each year of this course

Overview

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

MODULES

  • Core Modules
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    Director and the Text

    This module will introduce you to a range of skills required in order to direct a piece of theatre in line with professional standards and rehearsal techniques.

    The module aims to enable you:

    • To understand how a scene functions and the director’s role in realising the scene into performance
    • To work collaboratively with a sense of company complicité
    • To encourage the interpretation of texts, ideas, and emotions through voice and body
    • To create and sustain an improvised rehearsal or performance
    • To understand the role of the director in the dramaturgical process
    • To understand the relationship between the director and other creative professionals in the performance process
    • To understand mise-en-scene
    • To read a lighting plan
    • To facilitate the use of the body in a free, safe and flexible manner
    • To facilitate an awareness of space
    • To understand the necessity of a warm up
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    Devised Project

    This module is designed to introduce you to the practical and theoretical skills necessary in order to collaboratively devise a piece of theatre. By producing a cross-institution performance project, you will gain a practical understanding of key aspects of working as an ensemble while professionally interacting with an externally produced project / research brief. You will engage with current theory and contemporary performance practices emerging out of cultural sites and/or archival material and the ethical implications of producing performance in these domains.

    The project has a double focus:

    1. in devising as a means of making theatre and making meaning.
    2. in producing situated performance projects in collaboration with cultural institutions.

     

    The mains aims are:

    • To develop a range of skills required to devise theatre collaboratively
    • To develop an understanding of how devised performance and research are interdependent
    • To devise site responsive performance in collaboration with external partners.
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    Contemporary Performance Making

    This module will introduce you to the field of contemporary performance practices and methodologies. Throughout the term, you will explore a range theoretical and practical skills required to conceive, devise and produce a collaborative performance. Indicative topics of study include: interdisciplinary composition; participatory and immersive practices; site specific/responsive performance; and digital performance.

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    Research Methods in Creative Practice

    • To critically assess the application of social, historical, cultural and textual research methods to creative cultural products.
    • To facilitate the development of the practical skills necessary for the implementation of a research style for creative cultural projects and related written material.
    • To integrate theory with production
    • To further develop individual production skills
    • To develop research, planning and organisational skills
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    Performance Platform

    The aims of the module are to:

    • Provide you with the opportunity to pursue self-initiated work, which demonstrates a critical understanding of the approaches, practices and knowledge acquired earlier in the course.
    • Develop an advanced understanding of research methodology and project management for production-based work.
    • Provide you with the opportunity to develop production work to a high creative and technical standard.
    • Produce a written component that is based on critical reflection.
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    Mental Wealth: Professional Life - Performance Praxis

    This module will provide you with the opportunity to develop an innovative practice as research performance methodology that can lead to the production work of a high creative and technical standard. They will pursue self-initiated work, which demonstrates a critical understanding of the approaches, practices and knowledge acquired earlier in the course and applied to their project and develop an advanced understanding of research methodology and project management for production-based work. This module is provided for you to develop an innovative practice as research performance methodology and pursue self-initiated research based on an area of your choice leading to an outward facing production. You will demonstrate an understanding of theoretical perspectives pertinent to performance practice, to contain a coherent implementation of research methodology and pre-production planning and show evidence of original research.

  • Core Modules
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    Creative Practice

    As part of the final year in an MA/MFA pathway, this module is a supervised, independent, student-driven creative practice module, which offers students an extraordinary opportunity to develop their creative practice in depth and to complete a professional-standard, full-length creative output in their discipline. Students from a range of practice-based programmes will create individual practice-based research plans with their supervisor and programme leader in order to meet the learning outcomes described in this module. Students develop their own working practices with supervision by their named programme supervisor in order to explore and advance their projects and reflective components.

     

    This module will:

    • Offer individual students the opportunity to critically develop his or her own work in the context of a rigorous but supportive intellectual climate.
    • Encourage students to identify and explore those key contextual issues relevant to their artistic practice.
    • Guide students to critically evaluate their work and that of their peers in the context of contemporary professional artistic practice.
    • Enable students to achieve the highest possible standards in their work, so that MFA graduates have the confidence, maturity and intellectual and interpersonal skills necessary to function as successful creative practitioners.

     

    The module aims to:

    • Enable students to work with a significant level of autonomy in the production of a practice-based project
    • Enable students to produce a body of work that demonstrates a resolution of practice and critical understanding
    • Prepare students for the public presentation of work in collaboration with their peers and professionals in the field.
    • Allow students to confidently contextualise their own work within the parameters of contemporary art practices.
    • Further develop the ability to identify and formulate new critical insights into established practice
    • Further encourage informed critical reflection upon the relations between the student’s own practice and current issues within their discipline.

     

    Students are expected to demonstrate independence and 'ownership' in relation to their learning experience. In this focused environment each student learns how to organise and structure their working patterns in order to prepare themselves - both intellectually and practically - for the life of a professional practitioner in their chosen area. Each student, in conjunction with the programme team, will develop an individual learning plan and contract, which will stipulate the specific content of the creative practice involved in meeting the learning outcomes of the module.

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    MFA Professional Platform

    This module aims to facilitate students in creating and undertaking a professional platform for their creative work. Students will have supervised industry projects or placements related to their creative practice. Students will:

    • Engage with the creative industries in a professional context related to their work.
    • Create individual professional engagement plans with their supervisor and programme leader in order to meet the learning outcomes described in this module.

     

    This module will:

    • Guide students to create a professional portfolio of case studies, sketches/drafts of professional project, and reflection to prepare them for presentation/exhibition/residency in a discipline-specific conference, public event or professional industry installation or internship.
    • Enable students to achieve presentation/exhibition/residency or internship in their discipline as professional creative practitioners.

     

    The module aims to:

    • Prepare students for the public presentation of work in collaboration with their peers and professionals in the field.
    • Further encourage informed critical reflection upon the relations between the student's own practice and the current professional context of their discipline.

     

    The specific nature of the professional engagement will be determined between the student and the supervisor. Options include a professional exhibition, publication, work in a professional/dissemination context with a theatre, production company or publishing company, or another route agreed upon with the named programme.

    Each student, in conjunction with the programme team, will develop an individual learning plan and contract, which will stipulate the specific professional trajectory involved in meeting the learning outcomes of the module.

HOW YOU'LL LEARN

HOW YOU'LL BE ASSESSED

CAMPUS and FACILITIES

University Square Stratford

University Square Stratford, University Square Stratford

WHO TEACHES THIS COURSE

The teaching team includes qualified academics, practitioners and industry experts as guest speakers. Full details of the academics will be provided in the student handbook and module guides.

YOUR FUTURE CAREER