Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Study Details: MA 2 years full-time
The Performance programme at Central Saint Martins takes a radical, interdisciplinary, experimental, and frequently collaborative approach to performance-making. The work produced is political, free-thinking, and inclusive. It encompasses live performance, moving image, critical theory, socially engaged practice, choreography, scenography, dramaturgy, performance writing, animation, and immersive technologies.
MA Performance: Screen offers an experimental, open, and discursive framework in which to explore the convergent mediums of performance and moving image via critical thinking and experimental studio practice. Students are encouraged to situate their work within the context of the wider social, political, and economic realities of contemporary visual culture and interrogate how images are encountered, produced, and consumed. Specifically aimed at interdisciplinary moving image and performance makers, the course supports an expanding field of practice across performance art, artists’ moving image, expanded cinema, experimental film, participatory practice, documentary, community cinema, and post-internet art to encourage new approaches and methodologies of making, processes, and outcomes.
The course promotes the acquisition of practical production skills. These include single and multi-camera directing and dramaturgy, cinematography, lighting, choreography / blocking for camera, sound recording, editing and colour grading. The course is structured to simultaneously help students to develop an in-depth knowledge and understanding of relevant critical discourses including theories of performativity, mediation, and representation. Project outputs on the course might include single or multiscreen narrative works, site-specific installations, hybrid documentaries, experimental films, performance lectures, and online and immersive moving image projects.
Our student body and teaching team come from a wide range of personal and professional backgrounds. As a community, we are deeply committed to the idea that diverse environments are the most vibrant creatively and we actively celebrate difference. As a programme, we encourage creative risk-taking by cultivating a supportive and accepting environment in which unique individual and collective perspectives can develop. We believe in the potential for performance to change the society in which we all live.
On leaving the course, MA Performance: Screen graduates will be prepared for a variety of careers in the performance and screen industries. They will have the agility and confidence to diversify and respond to the demands of the current climate. The course takes a broad and creative view of performance and moving image, supporting progression into a variety of singular or portfolio careers in performance and moving image. You may go on to doctoral research, choose to work within contemporary art or film production, theatre, live events, art and design, photography, screenwriting, festival programming or curation.
We are committed to developing ethical performance screen practices. To achieve this, we are working to embed UAL's Principles for Climate, Social and Racial Justice into the course.
The course team welcomes applicants from a broad range of backgrounds. Applicants are expected to demonstrate sufficient prior knowledge of and/or potential in performance and/or moving image practices to be able to successfully complete the programme of study and/ or have an academic or professional background in a relevant subject.
Applicants are most likely to come from disciplines that might include: performance and performance design, film and video, fine art, photography, theatre and dance, media or film studies, fashion, architecture, anthropology, or areas of interdisciplinary creative practice. This course is intended for those who want to pursue specialism in moving image and screen-related performance.
The standard entry requirements for this course are as follows:
AP(E)L – Accreditation of Prior (Experiential) Learning
Applicants who do not meet these course entry requirements may still be considered. The course team will consider each application that demonstrates additional strengths and alternative evidence. This might, for example, be demonstrated by:
Each application will be considered on its own merit but cannot guarantee an offer in each case.
For fees and funding information, please see website
Unit 1: Film Practices (20 credits)
The initial practice block grounds you in the technical and practical aspects of single-camera audio-visual production. It encourages an expansion of knowledge through collaborative experimentation with different ideas and processes relating to camera, body and space. This unit will provide opportunity to develop skills in camera operation and cinematography, sound recording, lighting for video, editing, colour grading and audio post-production via practical workshops and conceptual experimentation. Privileging the body, outcomes for this unit might include experiments in live art, video-streaming, dance films, performance lectures or other forms of expanded cinema.
Unit 2: Cultures and Contexts (20 credits)
This unit introduces the contexts and critical values of new, contemporary and established screen formats via the analysis of key concepts and debates concerning the body and its relationship to film and video. Your understanding of the history and theory of performance and moving image is developed through a weekly programme of critical and historical studies lectures and interactive talks with guest practitioners. You will submit an individual written or audio-visual essay about a critical topic of your choice. This unit establishes the expectation that research interweaves with practice to support awareness of creative opportunity.
Unit 3: Creation and Production (40 credits)
The emphasis then shifts to ideas around film form and individual approaches to the creation and production of lens-based performance and moving image work. This enables you to develop a greater understanding of storytelling, narrative, and film language. This Unit explores the wider conditions of global visual culture and interrogating how images are encountered, produced, and consumed. Outcomes for this unit might include single screen short films, multiscreen installations, or immersive, VR (Virtual Reality), AI (Artificial Intelligence), gaming or other online projects. Unit 2 engages students with the expanding field for film and non-conventional forms. Exploding the potential of narrative and the experiences of time. The unit also provides opportunity for the public sharing of work.
Unit 4: Option Units (40 credits) Choose either: 4a: Community and Collaboration or 4b: Practice in Context
Unit 4 runs across the final term of Year 1 and the first term of Year 2. Core teaching encourages and facilitates students in gathering experience and evidence of learning from independent enquiry (practice) and by engaging with external communities in the making and public presentation of work. The two options are to pursue either applied participatory practices or engage with focused research themes.
The Community and Collaboration option considers ideas around performativity, activism, ethical representation, and models of participatory practice. It focuses on how contemporary moving image can reframe relationships between filmmaker and subject. You will collectively interrogate how stories about and with publics are performed, authored, and disseminated to audiences within and beyond the community in question. Outcomes for this elective might include participatory films, lens-based performance/ installation works, filmmaking workshops, multi-camera live streamed events or other forms of visual research.
The Practice in Context option considers a body of moving image or lens-based performance work of your choice. The unit asks you to critically evaluate and contextualise through an extended research document or equivalent in negotiation with the unit tutor. The research focus should complement your individual Major Project. The unit provides the opportunity to develop a larger set of questions and ideas using skills, knowledge, and understanding acquired over the course.
Unit 5: Major Project (60 credits)
The Major Project builds on your individual interest and knowledge acquired from previous units to produce a significant body of work. You will conduct in-depth research and experimentation and exercise creative authorship through narrative composition, storytelling, sited practice, and editing. On completion of the unit, you will be able to evidence a strong understanding of potential audiences, choreographies of distribution and circulation as well as the ability to critically self-evaluate your work.
Important note concerning academic progression through your course: If you are required to retake a unit you will need to cease further study on the course until you have passed the unit concerned. Once you have successfully passed this unit, you will be able to proceed onto the next unit. Retaking a unit might require you to take time out of study, which could affect other things such as student loans or the visa status for international students.
Start your creative future at University of the Arts London About University of the Arts London (UAL) University of the Arts London (UAL) is hos...
