Collaborative Theatre Making

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor and tutor: Professor Fintan Walsh
• Assessment: a 30-minute group presentation (80%) and 1500-word individual portfolio (20%)

How is performance collaboratively produced in theatre? What are the ideas, skills, styles and considerations underpinning collaborative practice?

In the studio, you will explore these questions with professional theatre artists who specialise in developing collaborative performance. In seminars, you will explore similar questions with Birkbeck’s world-leading academics. You will develop skills in collaborative theatre-making working with industry leaders, while expanding your knowledge of the key practices, histories, ideas, skills, styles, debates, collectives and companies shaping the most exciting collaborative performance forms. Throughout, your work will attend to the dynamic relationship between practice and theory, and lead to the creation of a new piece of collaborative performance.

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• demonstrate skills in the analysis and creation of collaborative theatre and performance
• demonstrate ways in which collaborative theatre can be initiated, generated and produced for performance
• critically and creatively demonstrate the relationship between collaborative theatre to other theatrical forms
• critically and creatively evidence how the meanings produced by collaborative performance vary across different forms, time periods, cultures and sites
• communicate understanding through a variety of subject-specific modes, including text, visual, sonic and performance-based media
• understand how professional theatre artists produce a new collaborative performance.