MA 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.

Teaching and learning encompass the relationship between ideas, process and context. Taking into consideration their personal lens, students will create a learning environment where complex social, cultural and artistic viewpoints can be explored.

Whilst studying and practicing on the course, you will engage with a range of theoretical and practice-orientated approaches, political and ethical positions, and methods of performance-making in relation to contextual settings.  Our focus is on student-centred learning, bringing your work to the critical scrutiny of the academic setting.

Students completing this postgraduate award will be able to:

• Make situated practice considerate of social and ethical responsibilities
• Negotiate the complex relationship between context, practice and communication
• Synthesise practical, research, evaluative and reflective skills.

The course promotes interdisciplinary practices that critically explore the conventional boundaries between art, performance, screen, theatre, place-making and activism. It recognises that the performance maker can be an agent for change in relation to local places and communities. It prioritises participation through activism, re-enactment, collaboration, imaginative hybridity and narrative (de)framing; forms of reverie, exploring place and senses of belonging.

Performance is conceived in three realms: organisational, cultural, and technological. It is expected that a performer’s practice will be developed or refined and that skills will be gained through engagement with the course, but the main arc of the curriculum centres on context, process, and reflection. The skills required will be different for each individual student: devising, facilitation, and camera will be taught online through live and recorded workshops. The content of the curriculum will focus on interdisciplinary creative practice, workshop and facilitation strategies, and compositional tactics that enable development and learning through performance, as a priority, rather than the completed outcome.

The intensive residentials will primarily focus on engagement strategies and habits of reflective practices.

We are committed to developing ethical performance practices. To achieve this, we are working to embed UAL's Principles for Climate, Social and Racial Justice into the course.