MA Performance: Society

Performance: Society

MA Performance: Society critically explores the conventional boundaries between art, performance, screen, theatre and activism. It recognises that you, the performance maker, can be an agent for change in relation to local places and challenges. The course examines how performance, and its methodologies can provoke debate, build community and make lasting change.

MA Performance: Society is aimed at students who are interested in participatory arts, socially engaged arts, applied theatre, site-specific, site-responsive performance, moving image, live arts, scenography and performance in the expanded field. CSM, as a College community, seeks to prioritise the urgencies relating to; identities and equity, climate ecologies, and publics and commons. The Performance: Society course recognises that its students will seek to contribute to collective efforts to address the urgencies faced by their community in a particular place as well as the global context.

Unit 1: Place Identity

• The start of the course is focused on your community, and your personal lens looking at location and place as a field for active and creative research. It asks eachindividual to share personal perspectives and sense of the local in relation to physical, psychological and cultural spaces. The unit initiates the exchange of intra-local conversations and encourages practice and enquiry as a mode of research.

Unit 2: Community

• You will start to explore strategies for building and understanding community through both debate and initial approaches to making or processing content. The theme of the unit is how performance in action can generate and extend the experience of community. These early initiatives are supported by group debate and through the application of practical theories and approaches to engaged practice.
• This unit considers and articulates the social and cultural context that you will respond to in Unit 3.

Unit 3: Situation

• Introduces you to storytelling as a model of performance and activism. Storytelling is a powerful tool to engage imagination, intervene in narratives and highlight the need for social change. By adapting and developing your practice through communal storytelling you will consider form, composition, and ethical reasoning.

Unit 4: Recognition of Experience Based Education and Learning (REBEL)

(Options: Unit 4a. Collaboration and Co-operation; Unit 4b. Analysis and Insights; Unit 4c. Making and Production)

• The Recognition of Experience Based Education and Learning unit supports you in building a bespoke and individually relevant program of learning based on a mixture of lived experience, personal projects, intensive workshops, and transcultural learning exchange (Shared Campus activity). It is assessed through reflective practice and a portfolio of evidence addressing Learning Outcomes that demonstrate advanced competence in either; collaboration and co-operation, analysis and insight, or making and production. Core teaching is the same for each of the three options. You are encouraged and supported in gathering experience and evidence of learning from independent enquiry (practice) and from engagement with international communities of practice.

Unit 5: Process

• Process is the core when we think of performance within society: how we make the work, why we make the work and for whom we make the work for. On this unit, as a group you will address considerations of audience and the nature of co-operation. You will examine how work is integrated into society not only through the outcome but also the process undertaken. An emphasis on sensitivity to content and context is key to socially engaged performance and the type of practice associated with its heritage. The emphasis of the unit is a synthesis of ideas and context to a level of resolution; your output will be scrutinised, further tested, remade and remembered throughout Unit 6.

Unit 6: Reflection and Performance

• By Unit 6, you will have gained experience of participation and co-operation with practitioners and thinkers beyond your immediate community. You will be encouraged to consider what it means to be a society in a global sense, and where community can be found or formed.
• Unit 6 focuses on a process of deepening critical enquiry and scrutiny –mostly through refinements to practice or the articulation of outcomes. Interaction with peers from the course and elsewhere becomes increasingly essential at this stage as this produces an enhanced understanding of wider contexts and possibilities.

Graduates from MA Performance: Writing will be equipped to work with creativity and focus in diverse environments, and to design and explore their own ways of working, confident in building and maintaining working relationships, yet also aware of their unique role in being the ‘champions’ of the story.

2 years (90 weeks) Online