MA/ MFA Scenography

The MA programme runs over one year (full-time). The year is made up of three terms of ten weeks and a fourth term of sixteen weeks. You will attend activities at Central during the first three terms.

The fourth term is given over to the writing up of the MA Sustained Independent Project (SIP).

The MFA programme runs over two years (full-time). Students will follow the first three terms of the MA programme in the first year comprising 120 credits. The second year of the programme, running from October to July, comprises an additional 120 credits in the form of the MFA SIP.

A feature of the programmes is their emphasis on your working alongside tutors and practitioners in an exploratory and supportive laboratory atmosphere designed to enable you to discover the potential within your practice. The programmes embody a research-led teaching approach, in which each participant contributes to a growing body of knowledge and understanding through their positive commitment to the project in hand. A great deal of emphasis is placed on your own interaction with the challenges and opportunities which the programme provides and you are expected to develop an independent and self-directed approach to your studies. Through reflection
on your own practice and that of others, and in relation to reading literature in your field, you will be encouraged to develop new methods.

The formative unit, Speculative Materials, instigates practical and theoretical questions around the representation of spatiality, aurality and the multi- sensory nature of embodied and performative practice. Students explore a range of media, modelling in real and virtual space to explore the temporal rendering of space, light, sound and the body. This unit results in an independent speculative project that is presented to tutors and invited practitioners at the start of the Spring term alongside the submission of an essay.

In the first part of Embodied Spaces, students explore space and action with themselves as subject.

Workshops are carefully designed to allow for those who have not worked with their own bodies’ and with others to create short physical improvisations. This performative material is then layered with and transformed by media (film and sound) and technological tools (Sensors, Isadora) applied to and drawing from the body, space, materials. One aim is to allow students to instigate an enquiry
wherein embodied experience challenges the primacy of the spectator and the visual within the multi- sensory interactive exchange that is the scenographic. In the second part of the unit students define a practical enquiry drawn from a specific aspect of the outcomes of the first part of the unit.

The enquiry must be conceived and undertaken within a collaborative context. These opportunities for new forms of exchange and dialogue aim to enable understanding from within and without differing forms of performance making and or spatial/ aural practices. Students may choose to work within existing performance making models, they may choose to author work themselves, as a
group of designers, or their enquiry may lead them to investigate new collaborative synergies with materials, technologies and with other disciplines.