Experimental Performance – MMus / PgCert / PgDip

If you want to study experimental performance in the UK, with or without a focus on sound, then these are the ideal courses for you.

Designed for emerging arts practitioners, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire’s brand new PgCert, PgDip and MMus courses in Experimental Performance provide you with a unique opportunity to undertake independent artistic projects in a fully supportive environment.

Available for the first time in September 2019, they enable practitioners from a variety of disciplines (including, but not limited to, instrumental/vocal performance, composition, dance, choreography, theatre, visual and performance art, creative writing) to come together with likeminded people.  This course doesn’t ask you to justify yourself against the background of tradition, but gives you agency. People from every discipline are treated equally with emphasis placed on rigorous conceptual thought and idea-development. By focusing on these non-discipline-specific aspects of performance you will contribute to a collaborative, discursive and interdisciplinary working environment.

The core of your study will be formed by your own artistic ideas, which are developed, through research and dialogue, into professional practical projects.

You will be allocated a mentoring team comprising a personal tutor who has experience in collaborative and conceptual approaches alongside additional specialist support according to your individual needs. Your mentoring team is there to help you realise your ideas into fully developed performances in the best possible way.

Our Experimental Performance courses will equip you with the skills you need to engage successfully with diverse contemporary creative practice. While our PgCert focuses exclusively on Experimental Performance work, complementary modules on the PgDip and MMus are intended to enhance your wider professional development. These will be chosen, in discussion with your personal tutor, from a varied list shared with other postgraduate Principal Study disciplines.

What’s covered in the course?

• In depth examination of your current artistic practice.
• Development of your ability to turn artistic ideas into effective performance material.
• Mentoring from specialist practitioners.
• Study within an interdisciplinary working environment that promotes collaboration and discussion.
• Regular group critique sessions.
• Using the wide range of spaces offered by BCU with privileged use of our new experimental performance space called The Lab.
• Understanding the context of your work and placing it in artistic and socio-political discourses.
• In PgDip and MMus, a core career development module designed to get you thinking about your future professional plans.
• In PgDip and MMus, the flexibility to choose from a broad menu of Professional Development modules designed to help you work towards achieving your personal career aspirations.
• In MMus, a core module designed to develop your skills as a researcher or informed practitioner.
• In PgCert, the ability to focus wholly on the Principal Study area.
• The possibility of transferring between PgCert, PgDip and/or MMus (as appropriate) once you have begun your studies (but before completion of your original course).

Why Choose Us?

This course has been created by artists who actively work with an interdisciplinary mind-set. Working in an interdisciplinary way to us means that you don’t settle for a particular artistic genre but you are interested in finding the best way of expressing an artistic idea. What form your realisation takes, what genres it borrows from would always depend on the particular idea.

We know how frustrating it can be when, instead of discussing your work in depth, you have to start by justifying why you work in the way that you have chosen to work. We understand that you might want to perform text on stage without being trained as an actor, or you might want to dance without having had lessons. We are interested in your ideas. We will listen to you, help you to think ideas through and find appropriate concepts for successful realisations in performance. We have considerable experience in this area and enjoy discussing people’s work and ideas.

This is a course that supports people who want to advance their artistic practice, whether this will ultimately lead to an advancement of your professional artistic career or to prepare yourself for PhD study with an emphasis on practice-as-research.

In addition to our significant expertise within Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, we are also able to work closely with colleagues in areas of artistic practice outside music – for instance, in theatre, visual art and media.