About Popular Performances, MA - at University of Winchester
Popular Performances allows students to engage in advanced study of popular theatre forms of many kinds including musical theatre, pantomime, circus, clown, puppetry, carnival, music hall, melodrama, stand-up comedy, farce, sitcom, cultural events, and applied and community theatre.
Programme ContentStudents are encouraged to explore the histories and contexts of particular theatre styles, and to identify recurring themes and approaches in composition, in the construction of audience-performer relationships, in the histories and contexts for performance, and in the politics of the popular. The programme also provides a variety of methods of research and enquiry that can be used in studying popular performances.
Study introduces students to a series of frameworks through which they can explore the breadth of popular performance forms in the UK and internationally. This strategy allows students to choose to focus on a single popular performance genre for the whole programme or to explore several before identifying a topic for Independent Study.
ModulesCore modules:
Introductory Module
Research Methods
Students then take three modules drawn from a choice of four which introduce a range of strategies for theorising or analysing popular theatre including:
Ethnographic Approaches to Popular Performance
Historiography and the Popular
Politics and the Popular
Dramaturgies of Popular Performances
Learning and TeachingSeminars and tutorials provide a forum in which all participants engage in a productive dialogue from which individual research directions arise. Teaching develops research skills and develops critical engagement and more sophisticated modes of analysis. Students are encouraged to undertake indepth study and reflection.
AssessmentModules are assessed by a combination of live oral presentation and written submission. The Independent Study is assessed by a 20,000 word written dissertation or by a negotiated combination of two or more of the following Case Study Modules: Workshop Practice, Performance Outcome, Written Reflection, Critical Evaluation or Extended Essay.
