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.

In this module, you'll focus on contemporary literary drama and dramatists from the Anglo-phone, Franco-phone and Luso-phone language zones in Africa. One of our major aims is to remove the tendency in previous African theatre and performance scholarship to study these theatre traditions and genres as separate, while in fact, the impulse behind them was essentially the same, and their hybridising strategies follow the same path.

You'll investigate the impact of different forms of colonisation on the creation and direction of the theatre. You'll explore the influences of the indigenous traditions and the function of theatre within African societies - you'll specifically look at theatre and politics, the role of the dramatist in Africa, the playwright and the state, theatre under apartheid and totalitarian regimes, theatre and liberation struggles, theatre and the universities, African audiences, video drama/movie (theatre, technology and innovation).

The module encourages you to explore and extend your perception and understanding of performance practice and cultural dynamics. You'll be encouraged to research one of the themes identified above, giving you the opportunity to explore a specific concern in contemporary African dramaturgy and theatre and performance practice.

The emphasis is on the interrelationship between the issues discussed in class and students' analysis of live and video performances, as well as of performance in the fieldwork of special interest to them. This module cross-refers to the theoretical and conceptual knowledge acquired in modules in the Autumn Term and builds on these acquisitions. As in these preceding modules, practice and conceptual reflection go hand in glove, and the perspective is interdisciplinary. The main groupings of concern here are corporeal and very much of the present: rituals (including urban ritual), shamanism, healing and performance, dance, hybrid forms (especially movement-based hybrids), and manifestations in alternative spaces such as site-specific performances, street and square performance, festivals, multi-ethnic performances, community theatres, and theatres of exclusion, including theatre of the homeless. The module encourages students to explore the multiple performances available to them in London and which will extend their perception and understanding of performance practice and cultural dynamics. You will be encouraged to do some fieldwork in a chosen performance area, which will give you the opportunity to explore types of current performance that challenge well-accepted practices and notions and extend your understanding and analysis of sociocultural dynamics.

This module focuses on a selected number of fundamental concepts, categories of thought and methodological issues and problems pertinent to cultural theory and its relation to performance.

The module is based on the premise that performance activity is a social and cultural practice. As such, performance is to be analysed, understood, explained and questioned in terms commensurate with its complexity. These terms are provided by interdisciplinary work, which, in this course, will draw, notably, on theatre and performance studies, the sociology of culture, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, political science, philosophy, aesthetics, and theories of signs and of artistic genres.

Although the module is primarily theoretical, it assumes that theory is dialogically interrelated with the practice of practitioners. It thus uses the latter to explore and develop points of theory; and uses theory to foreground aspects of theatre and performance practice. Apart from the inclusion of contemporary practitioners in the module structure, as indicated below, you'll be expected to engage with performances available to them in London and elsewhere during their studies, and discuss them in the seminar, as appropriate.

The interdisciplinary principles of the module highlight the interdisciplinary dimensions of what is, nevertheless, discipline-specific to drama, theatre and performance studies. The module is designed to allow you to carry the conceptual and methodological grounding provided by this core module across to the options offered by the MA in Performance and Culture. It is also designed to link intellectually with other MA programmes available at Goldsmiths College.

The module is structured on the idea that learning and critical inquiry are cross-referenced, cumulative, and require depth. Its structure fosters initiative in research, independent research and presentation of work, and collaborative effort in class discussion.

This module will explore Disability Theatre in the UK, focusing on the role that theatre and drama play in the development of a more inclusive society. Students will study the context in which Disability Theatre takes place and develop an understanding of the distinction between the “social” and “medical” models of disability and how this impacts on practice. The module will examine how a range of theatre and performance practices can address the barriers faced by people with physical, sensory and communication impairments, people on the autistic spectrum and people with learning disabilities. Students will develop critical frameworks to study a range of practices; topics covered include: the aesthetics of access, multi-sensory work for children with profound and multiple learning disabilities, participatory arts, outdoor performance and institutionalisation. Students will be encouraged to engage with contemporary practice and debates and there will be two guest speakers, Tim Webb (Artistic Director, Oily Cart) and Jenny Sealey (Artistic Director, Graeae) - both leading practitioners in Disability Theatre.

Radical Performance attempts to probe the creative innovations in theatre, performance, and live art practices that intersect with notions of 'radicality'. The topic is approached through an examination of the various creative elements that have underpinned theatrical experiments, challenges, and resistances. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical and philosophical aspects, this course aims to enhance students' abilities to critique the ethics and efficacy of radical performance.