MA Dance: Advanced Practice

Program Overview

This MA Dance: Advanced Practice program encourages specialization in pedagogy or repertory work, fostering employability in dance. Students delve into research projects, core and optional modules, and daily technique classes.

Program Outline

Degree Overview:

This MA Dance Advance Practice degree encourages you to further your Dance studies at a postgraduate level. You will have the choice to specialise in areas such as pedagogy or working with a choreographer in repertory as you focus on your employability. In your dissertation you will undertake an extended research project to develop your skills and practice in the area that you are most interested in. This could be fully written, a practical piece of choreography/practice as research, or a combination of the two. On this course you will:

• Study core and optional modules with the flexibility to balance your studies alongside working.
• Specialise in specific topics.
• Be able to complete daily Techniques for Performance classes alongside your weekly modules.
• Learn from highly experienced lecturing staff and dance practitioners all specialise in their chosen fields.
• Work and study with dance critics, to dance company directors and choreographers.

Outline:

This course is made up of core and optional modules. This list is indicative and subject to change.

• Artist As Producer: You will undertake initial research into a range of contemporary dance and performance related platforms, festivals, projects and artist-development schemes both within the UK and in European or international contexts.
You will develop an articulation of your work and practice through the development of a website resource that includes a distinctive artist’s ‘statement’.
• Dissertation: The dissertation is the culmination of your postgraduate study.
You will develop a substantial dance research project of your choice. You can choose to include a varying amount of dance practice alongside written critical commentary.
• Pedagogical Approaches: Through a combination of lectures, seminars and practical tasks, you will analyse, deconstruct and reconstruct technical exercises and phrases in order to build a critical base of teaching material.
Planning, phrase construction and giving corrections will be explored in the context of somatic development and consideration of issues relating to health and safety. You will also be expected to undertake critical analysis and evaluation of professional dance classes. You will be introduced to lesson planning, devising schemes of work appropriate to different teaching situations such as primary and secondary syllabus work, special needs and working with the elderly and community-based groups.
• Performing Politics: In this module, you will analyse a wide range of dance practices: historical and contemporary, popular and ‘high art’, Western and non-Western.
You will consider these in relation to twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about the politics of the body, for example: the roll of the body in mass culture; the extent to which the body is controlled by or resistance to the state; the roll of the body in colonisation and decolonisation; the roll of the body in negotiating local, national and global identities; the roll of the body in constructing sexual and gender identities; the relationship between the body and technology.
• Philosophy and Aesthetics: In this theoretical module you will explore how knowledge about dance is rooted in philosophical and aesthetic ideologies, from both historicised and contemporary perspectives.
You will look through a wide lens at dance and its evolving beliefs, with the main focus on dance as art, and contemporary dance.
• Repertory: This practical module is an opportunity to work on the creation or re-staging of a repertoire work.
Dancing in the construction or reconstruction of a work of repertory provides you with opportunities to extend creative practical skills in dance performance. You will apply your choreographic knowledge and performance skills to devising and problem-solving within select frameworks linked to research processes (practical and contextual) underpinning the repertory. You will engage with choreographic devising and performance as an independent group or as part of the MA company MapDance. To study this module you must also select Techniques for Performance.

Assessment:

You will be assessed through a range of assignments depending on which study options you choose. All modules are assessed through programme work in the form of practical choreography presentations, essays, reports, presentations, learning journals, portfolios, online tasks and group working.

Teaching:

You will study through theoretical and practical workshops, lecturers, seminars and rehearsals. Class sizes vary depending on the modules you and other students select. For example dance technique classes usually have up to 20 students whereas Performing Politics may have around 10 students.

Careers:

This MA Dance: Advanced Practice course supports your development of a portfolio career that can progress into areas such as dance performance, teaching, choreography, arts administration.

Other:

You will perform in an Arts Council funded Dance Theatre Space and rehearse in four superb dance studios, the large gymnasium and two sprung-floor spaces. You will also be able to take advantage of a programme of dance company performances, workshops and events supported by Arts Council funding. You will have opportunities to complete specific placements during this course. There are placements opportunities on the Pedagogical Approaches module where you can apply your teaching knowledge in areas including primary and secondary education or in a community setting. You could work with a youth dance group, or an older aged group such as Parkinson Group.

• UK fee: £10,575
• International fee: £18,000