Performance – Physical Acting - MA

Teaching

Teaching and assessment

Assessment is by coursework, including practical and written components for each of the modules, and by the final term project with options for a dissertation or mixed practice and dissertation.

Programme aims

This programme aims to:

• Provide a taught Masters programme of excellent quality that offers sustained and intensive engagement within the specialised area of Physical Acting, reflecting the Drama Department’s international reputation of research excellence in this specialism and preparing students for employment and further study.
• Offer opportunities for specialized development for graduate students as well as practicing artists and arts professionals nationally and internationally, meeting the lifelong needs of a diversity of students.
• Promote knowledge and understanding, technical skills and practical competencies of professional physical acting practice and its relation to cultural, social, political and historic contexts, through teaching informed by leading research and scholarship in the field.
• Provide high quality specialist teaching in supportive environments delivered by internationally leading experts, where students can refine their own practice and explore and develop their own distinctive strengths, qualities and style as emergent physical performers and makers.
• Provide extensive opportunities for students to reflect upon and critically examine their practice, promoting significant individual personal and professional development
• Enable students to initiate, self-direct and maintain independent approaches to their own learning and to develop their analytical, critical and interpretive skills, appropriate to postgraduate work
• Develop graduates able to contribute richly and competently to the regional, national and international theatre and performance profession, who possess the unique knowledge and skills developed on this programme and thereby further consolidate the department’s global reputation in this area.

Learning outcomes

Knowledge and understanding

You will gain knowledge and understanding of:

• the history, forms, practices, traditions and current configurations of drama, theatre and performance
• advanced critical, artistic and conceptual paradigms in order to comprehend, interpret and intelligently engage with the work of significant practitioners and theorists in the field
• variant aesthetic, aesthetic, political, social, and intellectual contexts of drama, theatre and performance
• the wider interdependence of creative practice, critical theory, production processes and cultural policies
• the inherent interdisciplinary and trans-national location and context of theatre art and performance practice, and its relation to the public and audiences
• innovative, challenging and informed methods and practices of making performance, the processes of rehearsal, writing, scoring, devising, sceneography, choreography, staging, promotion and training techniques.

Intellectual skills

You develop intellectual skills in:

• Understand the essential links between laboratory training and its application in acting and performance composition
• Undertake research and creative investigations as well as develop artistic ideas in creative, independent, and critically reflective ways
• Work autonomously on a performance project within set parameters and the ability to negotiate the various creative and administrative aspects of a performance process
• Independently define a research topic and to autonomously undertake and complete advanced, systematic, in-depth research, either through academic research or through practice research 

Subject-specific skills

You gain subject-specific skills in: (These will include practise and professional skills)

• Practical skills in physical and laboratory theatre training within a pre-professional academic context
• The ability to develop, individually and within an ensemble, physical training processes, with particular emphasis on body flexibility and vocal range
• Essential skills in a rehearsal process that link training with both independent and collaborative modes of composition and performance
• Organisational, strategic and interpersonal competencies for working in the creative sector, including generating marketing material, funding bids and professional CVs
• The documentation of creative processes and artistic work in effective formats as an integral part of the compositional and performance process 

Transferable skills

You will gain the following transferable skills:

• Work autonomously and collaboratively with others in team structures, understanding and negotiating group dynamics and handling and solving interpersonal issues
• Exercise initiative, take personal responsibility and discipline to define, set up, support, manage and realise a project over a sustained period of time within specified resource allocations of time, space and/or budget
• Demonstrate sophisticated communication skills, both oral and written, negotiating, communicating, discussing and documenting ideas, visions and critique and argument in a coherent, productive, and effective way
• Ability to frame, articulate, and communicate in sophisticated and coherent practice and/or writing the evidence base, debate and argument of the project/research undertaken
• Skills in independent learning required for continuous professional development
• Awareness of health and safety issues and risk assessment 

Careers

Arts graduates have gone on to work in a range of professions from museum positions and teaching roles to working as journalists and theatre technicians. Our graduates have found work in Pinewood Studios, The National Theatre and other arts, culture and heritage-related organisations, in roles including editorial assistants and even stunt doubles.

Study support

Postgraduate resources

The School of Arts’ award-winning Jarman Building offers professional standard drama facilities, along with social spaces and a dedicated centre for postgraduate students.

Additional facilities across the Canterbury campus include two theatres: the 113-seat Aphra Theatre (a courtyard-type gallery theatre space); and the Lumley Theatre, which is a flexible and adaptable white room space. Drama students also benefit from an additional rehearsal studio, a sound studio, a theatre design suite and an extensively equipped construction workshop.

The University’s Templeman Library is well resourced in our subject area and houses special collections of 19th-century manuscripts – playbills, programmes, prints and other theatre ephemera – theatrical biography and the history of the stage in the 19th and 20th centuries. It also has particular strengths as a research resource in English Renaissance drama, Russian and French theatre, and British theatre since 1900. We also house the Jacques Copeau Archive and the British Grotowski collection.

Conferences and seminars

We have strong links with organisations such as the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) and the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA), and encourage postgraduates to present work within national and international conferences. Also, we run regular research seminars, workshops, and performance-related events led by members of staff, students, and invited experts and practitioners.

Dynamic publishing culture

Staff publish regularly and widely in journals, conference proceedings and books. Among others, they have recently contributed to: New Theatre Quarterly; Contemporary Theatre Review; TDR: The Drama Review; Performance Research; Shakespeare Survey.

Global Skills Award

All students registered for a taught Master's programme are eligible to apply for a place on our Global Skills Award Programme. The programme is designed to broaden your understanding of global issues and current affairs as well as to develop personal skills which will enhance your employability.