MA/MFA in Advanced Theatre Practice

As a student on the MA or MFA Advanced Theatre Practice at Central, you can expect to:

• Engage in a collaborative laboratory for practical experimentation.
• Create new work for an extensive range of public encounters.
• Play a leading role in tomorrow’s performance and theatre making worlds.

In the first year of the MFA, you will join the MA students for Terms One to Three.

The MFA then extends into a second year beginning in October, enabling the development of further projects and professional connections outside the School. Working together during this initial period of creative growth, you will develop experience from the intensive workshop atmosphere of Term One, through learning to research and extending practice in Term Two, to launching a company or the approach to doing new work in Term Three.

You will be supported in this process of growth and development, gradually enabling you to become a stronger, more articulate practitioner, better able to work flexibly and constructively with others, extending the boundaries of theatre and how it might be seen.

Term Four of the MA focuses on taking work to an audience of choice beyond Central.

The MFA second year deepens and extends this opportunity for independent professional development beyond Central while still retaining a degree of contact and guidance from tutors. An MFA top-up year for those with an existing MA in this subject is also available.

Assessment

Practice is evaluated throughout the first three terms through continuous assessment of contribution to the rehearsal/development process, combined with essays reflecting on this work in the broader context of contemporary theatre practice. Peer assessment also forms a part of the evaluation process.

The course prepares you for the Sustained Independent Project. Those undertaking the MA will take a performance work that has been made with colleagues to a documented encounter with a public audience during the summer.

MFA students will choose from a list of possible approaches and means of documenting their work, undertaking a more developed and independent version of the Sustained Independent Project beyond Central during their second year.

• Develop experience from extensive workshops with leading professionals, learning to research and extend your own practice, launch a company, do new work, and, on the MA, finally take this to an audience beyond Central.
• Extend the roles of performer, director, writer, designer, dramaturg, puppeteer, musician, artist, or creative thinker in new and unexpected ways within a supportive atmosphere of discovery and innovation.
• Explore the interdisciplinarity of performer practices, performance composition or scenography through learning skills, exploring processes and experimenting with techniques. Become involved in web-based technologies and digital media, building on the tradition of theatre-making as a communicative medium of exchange, or inspired by the current wave of experimental directors, explore the distinct roles of director or performer working with text in contemporary theatre.
• Become involved in new technologies, digital media and virtual techniques or, inspired by the current wave of experimental directors, explore the distinct roles of director, performer, or puppeteer (of object theatre) working with text in contemporary theatre.
• Have opportunities to take work made on the course to festivals and events outside the School, for example, Camden People’s Theatre, Istropolitana Projekt (Slovakia), Zlomvaz Festival (Prague), Marathon Festival (Jerusalem), Bialystok Festival (Poland), Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Prague Quadrennial.
• Join a network of distinguished alumni, including winners of Olivier, Total Theatre, Irish Times, Deutsche Bank, Rolex Mentor and Protégée, JMK, Allen Wright, Linbury and Evening Standard Theatre Awards, changing the way we work and think about theatre.
• Have excellent opportunities, if undertaking the MFA, to work for an extended period with a number of distinguished external companies. You will be part of a carefully selected group who wish to pool your resources and imagine the theatre of the future.

Cutting-edge practice and thinking are the norms at Central.

Graduate employment and career pathways include:

• Performers
• Theatre Makers
• Directors
• Writers
• Producers
• Dramaturgs
• Lighting Designers
• Puppeteers
• Critics
• Scenographers
• Sound Designers
• Casting Directors
• Outreach Officers
• Technical Directors
• Assistant Directors

In companies including the Royal Court Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, Camden People’s Theatre, Theatre503, Hampstead Theatre, English National Opera, High Tide Festival, Complicite, Frantic Assembly, Shakespeare’s Globe, MKA Theatre of New Writing Australia, Melbourne Theatre Company and National Theatres of Finland, Iceland and the UK.