MA Performance Making

This module will equip you with the skills and understanding of how to frame performance-making practice as research in the context of academy and beyond. You'll focus on performance as a mode of enquiry training you to ask the questions, formulate the methods, engage with the contexts, and articulate the importance of the performance and research projects that they go on to develop during the course.

You'll draw on topical and timely questions surrounding artistic research, such as liveness/documentation (archives, re-performance, re-enactment) and modes of critique (creative-critical and art writing), inviting students to experiment with their own practice in response to the ideas and methodologies that are introduced. As well as training you to articulate their practice in performance and writing, the module introduces you to performance technologies and scenography (lighting, sound, media, set and costume design) as integral tools for performance-making.

In this module, you'll explore performance-making as an interdisciplinary, collaborative and compositional practice which is informed by practical research and critical theory. In this module, the ‘working with’, which underpins the whole programme approach to performance-making, is primarily concerned with students working within an interdisciplinary company and working with other artistic forms that are not performance. You'll explore and experiment with various performance materials, forms, genres and scenography, developing ways to translate, adapt and creatively respond to different artistic forms and disciplines by making performances, with a particular focus on collage, montage and composition. This module will allow you to gain skills practical understanding of how to think through performance: conceiving, designing and delivering concepts that are presented as performance practice. 

This module culminates in a collaborative interdisciplinary performance-making assessment with MA Writing for Performance and Dramaturgy and MMus Composition students and a short creative-critical written submission reflecting on their individual contributions to this task.

Teaching in this module is a mixture of regular classes, intensive practical workshops in performance-making methods and tutorials by the staff team and guest artists.

In this module, the ‘working with’ takes the form of city as a site. The focus will be on contemporary performance that takes place in the city. An investigation of how such performance practice engages with the sites in which it takes place – from the institutional creative sites (art galleries and museums) to urban public spaces (streets, parks, public transport and bridges). You'll explore the acts, actions and gestures that celebrate, contest and make visible the politics of public space, and their collaborative work leads towards ways of researching, creatively responding to and documenting the city as a place of performance. You'll be invited to explore the relationship between performance and place and engage with questions relating to the way performance makers engage with the politics and social value of the places they occupy, and the kinds of critical and social interventions that are enabled (or impeded) by art practice that draws its material from the cusp of public and private space.

Teaching in this module is a mixture of regular classes, intensive practical workshops in performance-making methods and tutorials.

This module draws on all the work undertaken on the programme over the year and provides a space for you to express your creative individuality, acquired specialist skills and the organizational expertise developed throughout. This module is made up of two units. Unit one is the practice-as-research that leads to a festival of public performances in June and July that is an opportunity for the students to bring to fruition the skills and the development of their practice. Unit two is the written creative-critical reflection on the practice research in relation to the preparation, process and methods, outcomes and socio-cultural context.

In the summer term, you'll generate the performance material for your respective productions in line with their project proposal under the supervision of the staff team.  You'll work to a proto-professional production schedule covering rehearsals, production meetings, technical rehearsals, dress rehearsal, preview performance and a run of public performances.  You'll also be required to produce appropriate marketing material for your work and to situate your work, and yourself, in the professional sector. 

In week four of the summer term, you'll be asked to share your work in progress at a Research and Development sharing to receive feedback from the staff team and their peers.  The final productions will take place at the end of June – beginning of July within Goldsmiths Final Degree Show programme. Industry guests will be invited to these productions.

You'll be supported through the Professional Development module to generate marking and publicity materials for your work to design an impactful and exciting festival of work.

This practice-as-research project will be accompanied by a written submission that engages with the questions, methods, contexts and significances of the project in an equally creative way that is expressed in writing.