Program Overview

MA/MFA Performance

The MA/MFA Performance is an exciting taught masters programme that offers a practical, versatile, and interdisciplinary approach to performance-making and training. The programme provides students with an advanced and practical understanding of current performance practices, drawing on a broad range of artistic and theoretical influences.

Course Overview

The development of new creative practice is at the core of the programme, as well as how this work might be developed and profiled in a professional context. Furthermore, MA/MFA Performance offers students the chance to specialise in either of the distinctive areas of laboratory theatre or contemporary performance.

Features and Benefits

• MA/MFA Performance capitalises on the cultural effervescence of Manchester and the North West region, whilst maintaining an outward-looking ethos, offering students the ability to develop an artistic voice.
• Our location in the landmark new Grosvenor East building provides the programme with access to significant resources and the potential for cross-disciplinary influence and impact from a wide range of related arts and humanities practices in the faculty.
• The degree is taught by practitioner-researchers at the forefront of the performance field, with specialist knowledge in contemporary performance and laboratory theatre.
• The programme prepares students to make radical theatre and performance that responds to the unique challenges of the 21st century.

Year 1

Core Modules

• Major Project: In this module, students pursue artistic and theoretical research questions through the generation of a significant new piece of contemporary performance practice.
• Performance in Context 1: Performance in Context 1 introduces students to the artistic and theoretical contexts in which current contemporary performance practice operates.
• Performance in Context 2: This module continues to explore the current field of contemporary performance, building upon the work developed in Performance in Context 1.
• The Contemporary Laboratory: This module will involve workshops and making processes that examine what a performative practice might consist of for artists making their own work.
• Performer as Maker: Performer as Maker explores key contemporary performance strategies, drawn from radical theatre and dance practice, that focus on the body as an innovative source for developing material.
• Professional Practices: This module reflects on the professional contexts that exist for contemporary performance, and engages with key strategies for self-producing and profiling performance work.

Option Modules

• Making Performance: Making performance explores current contemporary devising strategies in order to facilitate the generation of new and innovative live performance.
• Psychophysical Training: Psychophysical Training is an intensive practice-based module allowing students to interrogate strategies and principles underpinning physical and vocal training for the actor.

Year 2

Core Modules

• Production: This module offers students the opportunity to develop a major practice-based project that is specifically designed to operate within the professional context identified in the MFA Production Contexts module.
• Production Contexts: In this module, students will identify new professional contexts for their work that will enable them to sustain their professional practice.

Study and Assessment

• Full-time: 35% lectures, seminars or similar; 0% placement; 65% independent study
• Part-time: 35% lectures, seminars or similar; 0% placement; 65% independent study
• Assessment: 100% coursework; 0% practical; 0% examination

Entry Requirements

• Normally applicants will have a good undergraduate UK honours degree (minimum 2:2) in a related subject (or international equivalent), or a degree-equivalent postgraduate diploma, or a professional qualification, or relevant professional practice.
• IELTS overall requirement 6.5 with no less than 5.5 in any category.
• Progression onto the MFA requires that all 180 credits of the MA are passed, with at least a mark of 50% in each unit.
• Interview may be required.

Fees and Funding

• UK and Channel Island students:
  • Full-time fee: MA £12,000. MFA £20,000 (Year 1 £12,000, Year 2 £8,000).
  • Part-time fee: £2000 per 30 credits studied.
• EU and non-EU international students:
  • Full-time fee: MA £22,002. MFA £36,670 (Year 1 £22,002, Year 2 £14,668).
  • Part-time fee: £3667 per 30 credits studied.

Careers Support and Prospects

• MA/MFA Performance graduates will leave the programme able to operate as performance practitioners at a professional level, whilst understanding the vocational and critical contexts in which the field operates.
• This will empower them to develop a career as freelance theatre artists, or as other professionals in the sector (producers, programmers, facilitators, curators, pedagogues etc.) or to combine these identities based on their own interests/skill-sets, as is increasingly common practice in the portfolio careers built by performance artists.