MA Writing for Performance

This course offers you the opportunity to write for film, television, radio, new media and theatre. This course is designed for students who wish to prepare for a sustainable professional career in writing for live and recorded performance. Practice, skill building and student centered learning are at the heart of the programme. The programme has a strong emphasis on the relationship between theory and practice, and following a first semester of intensives and lecturer input, a flexible mode of study will develop to enable you to pursue your own learning experience.

A range of assessment types are utilised, including critical based essays, project proposals, reflective essays and extended research projects. Together these form components of the research process and enable you to develop your research project to reflect your individual cultural and academic research interests. Throughout the programme we use a mixture of formative and summative assessment. Formative assessments are preliminary works that are not graded, (e.g. a draft of a script), which will help you in the successful completion of the modules and the programme. Summative assessments are the formal assessments which form part of your final grade. You must complete these to gain the ‘right to be assessed’ in the summative assessments.

Although the focus on the programme is writing for performance, the course will equip you with a range of transferable skills. These included a range of writing skills and careers, e.g. playwriting, brochure writing and planning, marketing and publicity writing, teaching and motivational speaking.