MA Experimental Theatre Practice

Plymouth Marjon University

Course Summary

MA Experimental Theatre Practice is for practitioners who want to advance their skills as artistic collaborators who are passionate about research, making, performing, directing, writing and/or producing their own work within a collective network and diversely creative community.

You will work within an ethos of skills exchange, horizontal hierarchies, process and practice based learning. You will be invited to place your ideas and methods in dialogue with key practices and current thinking within the wider socio-political, cultural landscape, finding new ways to work with different forms, materials, and media.

The course has an international outlook and is committed to forging connections between European and non-western theatre perspecitives. It encourages site specific and site located work, theatre practices which combine media, connect spaces, immerse audiences and want to constantly re-consider what theatre might look like in the 21st Century.

Practical work will be underpinned by contextual study, deepening and broadening an understanding of the field though seminar, presentation and debating forums. Students position their own perspectives within the many converging and contesting perspectives that make our contemporary landscape so vibrant and dynamic. Students are immersed in embodied practice via taught workshops while intellectually considering the semiotic and/or phenomenological encounters involved in a creative process.

MA Experimental Theatre Practice offers a solid structure of learning which allows for flexibility and freedom within. It invites students from all live art disciplines (Acting, Theatre Studies, Musical Theatre, Drama, Dance, Performance Studies) as well as students who may wish to place their own (non-live) practice-proposal within the live medium in order to use the live experience as a mode of analysis.

The course encourages a vibrant cross-pollination of ideas, technique, skill, speciality and approaches to making. Students will be encourage to create work outside the black box theatre.

Plymouth, with its rich history and vibrant culture stands between the ocean and the moors, and thus offers endless possibilities for site specific projects and the chance to engage a range of communities and audiences.

How will you be taught?

Teaching combines professional workshops, seminars, one-to-one supervision and independent research.

How will you be assessed?

Assessments cover the process, production and presentation of live work, lecture-presentations, written assignments and vivas.

What might you become?

Graduates of MA Experimental Theatre Practice will be prepared to build and manage their careers and continued growth in a varied and broad employment landscape. They will be confident and articulate in both written and oral contexts. They will be aware of and connected to the wider professional and academic world in which their own artistic pursuits sit.

Graduates will be ready to carve their own place within the professional field. You'll graduate with a strong out-facing identity, ready to not only join but to evolve and reshape the field.