Theatre MA - 2024/5

Other information

Employability
Many of the students who take up this programme are already in the middle of chosen career paths (as performers, theatre makers, or teachers, to name only a few examples), and the programme is designed from start to finish to help students either further progress in their already-established careers, and/or make changes to their career paths (such as moving from FE to HE teaching, for example). The knowledge, skills, and tools offered by the programme are intended to help students find more productive relationships between the study of theatre, the making of theatre, and the pursuit of productive careers. This is exemplified in a modules such as TDLM012 Professional Development or TDLM003 Independent Research Project, but it is an ethos which underpins all of the assessments across all of the modules, whereby we encourage students to approach the assessment from an individualized and ¿tailored¿ perspective. This approach allows students to directly relate their study and their assignments on the programme to their professional work outside of the programme.

Global and Cultural Capabilities
A key advantage of the distance-learning aspect of this programme is the ability to draw together students and voices form disparate communities across the globe. Students meet each other virtually, in online seminars, through discussion boards, and through other modes of inter-cohort communication (such as Facebook and WhatsApp groups). In tandem with this element of the programme, the curriculum design is intended to weave together Western-centric approaches to theatre with an expanded exposure to global performance practices. Additionally students are (as above) encouraged to fashion their assessments according to their individual circumstances and social or cultural contexts and areas of expertise. In these ways, the programme strives to increase awareness and understanding of multi-cultural theatrical practices and contexts.

Digital Capabilities
An attentiveness to digital capabilities is, of course, naturally embedded in a distance-learning programme, wherein resources, materials, and assessments are produced, shared, and responded to in digital fashion. Moreover, the individualistic ethos of the programme encourages students to take up creative modes of assignment submissions (for both formative and summative assessments) which may include work with digital technologies, where appropriate.

Sustainability
The past three decades have seen a vastly increased amount of scholarship on the relationship between performance and sustainability, as well as great increase in creative theatre work that addresses ¿ thematically and in practice ¿ issues of our care for our environment. As a critically rigorous MA programme, many of the modules on the programme directly introduce students to this scholarship and/or these practices (in particular TDLM010 The Background to Theatre, TDLM014 Global Theatres, and TDLM013 Modern Theatre). In addition, students are encouraged to address questions of sustainability in their more independent work (such as that on TDLM012 Professional Development and TDLM003 Independent Research Project).

Resourcefulness and Resilience
The programme is in many respects student-led, and it is run without consistently set ¿classes¿ or meeting times. Students are required to work through the material (with periodic support) in their own fashion and pace, within some broad timeframes (aligning with the wider structure of the academic calendar). As such, students must be resourceful in terms of how they proceed through the material, and in terms of how they procure additional materials (scholarship, performance viewings, and so on). Additionally, as a programme designed to be undertaken alongside work or other life-commitments, students must be resilient when conflicting deadlines or pressures (from outside the programme) arise. Finally, much of the content of specific modules (such as TDLM013 Modern Theatre, TDLM010 The Background to Theatre, and TDLM014 Global Theatres) expands students¿ knowledge of the ways in theatre and performance makers historically demonstrate their own kind of resourcefulness and, at almost every turn, enact individual and cultural resilience; in other words, theatre itself requires resourcefulness and performs resilience.