MA Performance Making

This international MA gives you the opportunity to develop your practice as an independent and collaborative performance practitioner. It invites you to explore and experiment with live, digital, intermedial and socially and politically engaged performance.

Develop your own performance practice

• The MA Performance Making programme fosters a creative-critical, experimental and interdisciplinary approach to performance. You’ll study with and learn from a diverse range of practitioners from different creative disciplines, exploring your own practice through performance-making.
• You’ll gain both practical and critical skills in composing performance, while being encouraged to question, challenge, and reconfigure what performance-making is.
• During your studies, you’ll be guided to create a portfolio of performances and writings that are designed to let you experiment, take risks and push your own boundaries in a rigorous and supportive learning environment, expanding and transforming your practice.
• You’ll have the opportunity to take part in a final-year degree show, showcasing your work and celebrating the culmination of your studies.

Practice as research approach

• Performance-making is a mode of enquiry that considers performance as a strategy to think about art, culture and the contemporary world. This practice-as-research approach is embedded throughout the programme.
• You’ll be encouraged, guided and supported to become an articulate practitioner and a creative thinker; able to conceive, make, critique, and write about your own or others’ performance.

Study collaboratively and independently

• You‘ll engage with performance-making as a collective act, and collaboration is built into the structure of the course. You will work with and alongside fellow students and staff with different specialisms. This international community of colleagues and collaborators will enrich your studies.
• You’ll also undertake independent practice and research, giving you the opportunity to focus on your specialist areas of interest in performance-making.

Gain skills and experience in scenography

• A hands-on introduction to performance technologies (lighting, sound, media) will give you the skills and confidence to integrate scenography into your performance-making.
• You'll learn from a dedicated team of theatre designers and technicians both in class and as you develop and put on your assessed performances.
• You’ll learn production management, curation and event organisation culminating in a student-led public performance festival in the Summer Term.

Contact the department

If you have specific questions about the degree, contact Katja Hilevaara.

We welcome candidates to the programme who are interested in exploring their own creative practice through performance making, and who demonstrate a competence for independent research and a keenness to work collaboratively. You are expected to have some experience in the fields of theatre and performance, usually evidenced in a personal statement and expanded in an interview. Otherwise you should be able to show an understanding of how performance might complement your unrelated creative experience.

Qualifications

You should have (or expect to be awarded) an undergraduate degree of at least upper second class (2:1) standard in a relevant/related subject.

You might also be considered for some programmes if you aren’t a graduate or your degree is in an unrelated field, but have relevant experience and can show that you have the ability to work at postgraduate level.

International qualifications

We accept a wide range of international qualifications. Find out more about the qualifications we accept from around the world.

If English isn’t your first language, you will need an IELTS score (or equivalent English language qualification) of 6.5 with a 6.5 in writing and no element lower than 6.0 to study this programme. If you need assistance with your English language, we offer a range of courses that can help prepare you for postgraduate-level study.

Where this degree can take you

Graduates from the programme typically go on to work as employable performers and researchers, cultural leaders and programmers, and innovators and collaborators in the performing arts both in the UK and internationally.

Some teach at school, college and university level and provide freelance workships, while others continue their practice-based research at PhD level, with several returning to the department for this after graduating from the MA.

Many find work in related areas of the profession, including as programmers, venue directors, project leaders, market development directors, dramaturges and directors.

What some of our alumni are doing now

• www.taniaelkhoury.com
• www.zoukak.org
• www.rooftopproductions.hk/en
• www.liveartgardeninitiative.org.uk/mariallanderas.html
• www.2divide.weebly.com
• www.palimpsest.weebly.com

Skills

You will gain skills in an ability to conceive, prepare for, contribute to and execute original performance material.

You are also expected to become proficient in articulating research questions, aims and outcomes, and critically situating your own practice within the field of contemporary performance while also developing your critical writing skills.

You will develop a range of transferable skills to equip you for professional employment in a wide variety of contexts, in particular collaborative and interdisciplinary environments that require effective communication, organisation, collaboration and decision-making.

Find out more about employability at Goldsmiths.