Re-frame and challenge your artistic practice
This new course is expansive in how it interrogates the conventions of cultural, aesthetic or historical assumptions about contemporary dance. You will explore how dance practices are experienced and how they can be situated within wide social, political and artistic contexts. As a practice-led, and student centred course, you will develop professional skills and your portfolio of work, whilst we offer the space and support for you to re-frame and challenge your practice.
The course supports artists at different stages of their career who are forging their own paths as dancers, makers, teachers and facilitators, helping graduates to transition into or continue working confidently within the independent dance sector.
Throughout this course you will develop a portfolio of work which aims to build your confidence in how you contextualise your practice and how you can communicate your ideas.
The course:
- Is a 12-month MA course running from January to December.
- Has a strong research focus.
- Is centred around the learning journey of the individual within a community of researchers.
- Offers group learning and peer feedback.
- Explores different modes of communication and presentation including live performance, presentation, project proposals, digital outputs, and reflective portfolios.
You are encouraged to:
- Critically reflect on your own practice, acknowledging your own personal narratives and histories.
- Be autonomous and self-motivated in your own learning.
- Come with an open mind, be curious and be willing to take risks!
It will give you the opportunity to:
- Engage in a range of embodied, collaborative and reflective practices, choreographic approaches, political debate and creative experimentation.
- Build the necessary skills to be able to initiate and realise creative projects independently.
Validated by University of the Arts London (UAL).
DSL’s PGDIP/MA Professional Acting is an intensive and comprehensive preparation for entry into the 21st century performance industries.
Working in small groups, the course is delivered through entirely practical, vocational classes, workshops and rehearsals which lead to focused performance projects. These sessions immerse you in the methods and approaches of British and European performance practice as they apply to and influence the contemporary theatre landscape. Expressive and technical skills are developed for work across video and audio media throughout the course, alongside developing your own core vocal and physical practice. You are encouraged and enabled to explore and take control of your own working process and expressive potential, rather than following a single methodology or attaining an idealised voice and body. You can expect to evolve an adaptable, broad ranging and immediately employable skillset for the profession.
You may not have made the decision of whether you will do the PG Dip or the MA yet. This can be discussed in your audition.
Our MA Playwriting course is an intensive one-year programme designed to provide a genuine gateway into a writing career in the theatre and performance industries.
Like our successful MA Screenwriting course, the MA Playwriting is taught by practitioners and is vocationally-oriented and industry-focused.
Over the course of the year, you will work with leading industry practitioners to develop your playwriting, pitching and dramaturgical skills. You will learn about and develop skills in writing for performance across a diverse range of contexts, genres and themes.
By the end of the course, you will have developed at least one full-length stage play, a collection of one-act dramas, a full-length festival play and at least one play that adapts elements of a classic text to engage with a contemporary context.
You will have access to individual career guidance and training in how to navigate entry-level writing work in the theatre and performance industries. The course features regular speakers from the industry, including returning alumni who have established successful careers as writers, dramaturgs and producers.
In Semester 1, you will study the basics of playwriting as a craft, with a focus on form and structure. This will include engaging with plays in textual form and in live performance, and the study of plot/story, character, genre, scene development, monologue and dialogue, dramatic action, beginnings, endings, features of staging and audience relationship.
You will study a diverse range of new and historical works, including historical plays that have brought about innovations in dramatic form and structure, as well as new writing staged in Britain and further afield in recent years.
In the second semester, we turn to industry-oriented study, focusing on developing new pieces for festival contexts, and on the skills and resiliencies needed to sustain a living in playwriting.
There will be an industry day based at our studio theatre on campus, with talks from directors, agents, producers, publishers, literary officers and writers.
Are you interested in shaping the future of the arts and cultural sector? This long establish and forward-thinking MA in Arts, Festival and Cultural Management will allow you to gain a better understanding of the management of cultural organisations and the individual factors that influence the environment in which they function.
The course will appeal to a range of individuals and will qualify you for a broad range of management positions within a wide spectrum of cultural organisations and festivals.
The may interest those already working in the sector who want to gain a formal qualification as well as undergraduates, of perhaps arts and humanities courses, who have not studied management previously and who are looking for a career change.
The course is delivered both full and part-time with start dates in September and January and offers the flexibility to develop your skills and knowledge whilst in employment.
MA Performance: Politics and Social Justice at Wimbledon College of Arts explores contemporary theatre and performance as practices of cultural critique, social protest and political intervention.
MA Performance: Politics and Social Justice focuses on cultural politics and critical aesthetics in contemporary performance. The course emphasises socially and politically engaged practices and methods of enquiry and encourages creative outcomes that tackle social justice issues.
Your approach to performance, politics, and social justice should be a practical one. A studio-based learning environment will enable you to focus on making performance.
The course wants you to:
- think critically about the cultural politics of your performance-making
- place your work in the context of global and local political challenges
- look at how your work addresses social, racial and climate justice
- re-imagine the possibilities of theatre and performance.
Wimbledon aims to provide fertile ground for the formation of new socially and politically engaged performance practices and collectives. The course will encourage you to become a confident artist, activist, and researcher.
An internationally unique course which trains you to create, explore, examine and expand queer performance practice.
The first and only MA of its kind to focus on queer performance, this course offers broad training in a range of queer performance practice, delivered by renowned queer artists, theatre-makers, academics, and researchers.
Fiercely socially engaged, political, experimental, and interdisciplinary, the course provides an in-depth, comprehensive examination of queer performance practice, studying its themes, methodologies, and untapped possibilities.
By collaborating closely with other queers in a supportive context, the course develops and expands your individual practice by offering opportunities to contextualise your work while collaborating with others.
We welcome all students with an interest in engaging with queer performance, whether primarily as maker (in theatre, live art, drag, cabaret, writing, video and moving image, sound art, digital arts), researcher, critic, facilitator or producer.
Duration: 15 or 28 months
MA Puppetry at Wimbledon College of Arts explores and develops the art forms needed for the creation of puppetry.
Working with other students you will design, devise, create and interrogate puppetry. Through research and experimental projects, you will build upon and push current practices.
As an applicant to this course, it is expected that you will have:
a good understanding of the complexities of puppetry as a practice
an awareness of the global reach of this performance tradition
knowledge of both live and recorded uses of puppetry within the entertainment industry.
MA Puppetry sits within a wider portfolio of making and designing courses. Aligned with Wimbledon's expansion into screen, visual effects (VFX) and other augmented reality design, this MA course supports any applied or interdisciplinary applications for the art of puppetry. It also engages with some established traditions of this genre of performance-making.
At Wimbledon, engaging with vocational expertise is central to the development of techniques. You will learn key skills to create work to industry standard.
By the end of the course, you will have developed a professional portfolio. This will communicate your capabilities. It will show flexible and proactive approaches to employment that the field requires. It will also aid progression into further artistic research.
MA Performance: Theatre Making at Wimbledon College of Arts invites you to re-imagine the possibilities of theatre and performance and expand the horizons of your practice.
MA Performance: Theatre Making will enable you to develop your creative and critical practice. It will encourage you to become a confident and articulate theatre maker and researcher.
Performance at Wimbledon is approached through questions of politics and ethics as well as aesthetics and practice. The course asks you to examine them through practical investigation and experimentation in a studio context.
You will think critically about your theatre making. You will want to place it in the context of contemporary performance and visual culture.
The course focuses on:
- Theatre-making as an integrated, multi-disciplinary practice. Combining, for example, writing, design, acting and dramaturgy.
- Developing innovative compositional strategies for performance-making as a studio-based, embodied and material practice.
- The creation of post-dramatic and politically engaged performance.
- Collaboration.
The innovative MA Performing Arts provides fantastic opportunities for you to explore your own specialism within performing arts in line with your personal career aspirations. It allows you to stand apart from others in your chosen field and lead the discussion in the performing arts sector.
Are you a performing arts practitioner – either a performer, choreographer, director, or entrepreneur – with innovative ideas and a desire to work together with students from different fields?
During your MA, we’ll help you turn your ideas into reality. We’ll introduce you to cutting-edge research and assist you with broadening your network within the industry.
This MA gives you the opportunity to work alongside and make connections with outstanding industry professionals, while developing your own style as a creative practitioner.
Studying the MA Performing Arts is the next step if you want to further develop yourself academically, creatively and professionally after your degree.
