Text and Performance MA

This highly distinctive MA course, run as a partnership between Birkbeck and RADA, brings together cutting-edge practice and scholarship in theatre and performance. Join us and you will work with Birkbeck's experts in theatre and performance studies and RADA's faculty and visiting theatre practitioners to experience both making and studying theatre.

This course does not offer actor training, but will deepen your critical and practical understanding of theatre and performance practices in context and leads to a prestigious postgraduate qualification from the University of London.

Taking the dramatic text as a critical starting point, our course encompasses drama from the early modern period to the contemporary. In the rehearsal room, you will create new theatre and performance work responding to set texts and themes. You will also engage with performance techniques to develop your skills as a playwright, director and dramaturg.

In academic lectures and seminars, you will encounter theoretical, historical, critical and philosophical writings. You will theorise live performance and write about the ways in which new performance work is informed by both contemporary concerns and older theatrical traditions and legacies. In the final dissertation project, you will exercise your own creative voice as a director, dramaturg, playwright or scholar.

TEACHING

Teaching may include formal lectures, seminars, and practical classes and tutorials. Formal lectures are used in most degree programmes to give an overview of a particular field of study. They aim to provide the stimulus and the starting point for deeper exploration of the subject during your own personal reading. Seminars give you the chance to explore a specific aspect of your subject in depth and to discuss and exchange ideas with fellow students. They typically require preparatory study.

CAREERS AND EMPLOYABILITY

This programme uniquely combines the practical and academic exploration of theatre and performance, which means you will graduate equipped with a broad range of highly employable skills, ideal for entering the creative industries or undertaking further academic study.

Our graduates can be found in a wide range of exciting careers including teaching and education, theatre practice, advertising, marketing and public relations, theatre, media, film and the creative arts, journalism, arts administration and outreach, policy and strategy for political organisations, charities or NGOs, and publishing.

MA Text and Performance does not take the place of training in a specific conservatoire discipline and is therefore described as non-vocational.