MA Performance: Screen supports you to define your voice and strategy as an independent film maker and screen-based performance maker.

Course overview

The Performance programme at Central Saint Martins takes a radical, interdisciplinary, experimental, and frequently collaborative approach to performance-making. The work produced is political, free-thinking, and inclusive. It encompasses live performance, moving image, critical theory, socially engaged practice, choreography, scenography, dramaturgy, performance writing, animation, and immersive technologies.

MA Performance: Screen offers an experimental, open, and discursive framework in which to explore the convergent mediums of performance and moving image via critical thinking and experimental studio practice. Students are encouraged to situate their work within the context of the wider social, political, and economic realities of contemporary visual culture and interrogate how images are encountered, produced, and consumed. Specifically aimed at interdisciplinary moving image and performance makers, the course supports an expanding field of practice across performance art, artists’ moving image, expanded cinema, experimental film, participatory practice, documentary, community cinema, and post-internet art to encourage new approaches and methodologies of making, processes, and outcomes.

The course promotes the acquisition of practical production skills. These include single and multi-camera directing and dramaturgy, cinematography, lighting, choreography / blocking for camera, sound recording, editing and colour grading. The course is structured to simultaneously help students to develop an in-depth knowledge and understanding of relevant critical discourses including theories of performativity, mediation, and representation. Project outputs on the course might include single or multiscreen narrative works, site-specific installations, hybrid documentaries, experimental films, performance lectures, and online and immersive moving image projects.

Our student body and teaching team come from a wide range of personal and professional backgrounds. As a community, we are deeply committed to the idea that diverse environments are the most vibrant creatively and we actively celebrate difference. As a programme, we encourage creative risk-taking by cultivating a supportive and accepting environment in which unique individual and collective perspectives can develop. We believe in the potential for performance to change the society in which we all live.

On leaving the course, MA Performance: Screen graduates will be prepared for a variety of careers in the performance and screen industries. They will have the agility and confidence to diversify and respond to the demands of the current climate. The course takes a broad and creative view of performance and moving image, supporting progression into a variety of singular or portfolio careers in performance and moving image. You may go on to doctoral research, choose to work within contemporary art or film production, theatre, live events, art and design, photography, screenwriting, festival programming or curation.

We are committed to developing ethical performance screen practices. To achieve this, we are working to embed UAL's Principles for Climate, Social and Racial Justice into the course.