Master of Theatre Practice

The one-year Master of Theatre Practice is an extension of the one-year Postgraduate Diploma in Performance Creation currently in operation at VCA Drama. It will allow high achieving students to develop an increased level of specificity in the development of their arts practice. The course will also include sufficient theoretical and research subjects to provide a stepping-stone to a Professional Doctorate programme. The course will have two concurrent parallel streams (in Directing and in Performance Creation), which will share some subjects but will diverge in the focus each stream gives to the nature of the main practical project. The Master of Theatre Practice provides an alternative pathway to the Master of Dramatic Art (Direction)by Research or Master of Animateuring (by Research) currently offered at VCA Drama, by combining advanced courses in specific disciplines with opportunities to work across disciplines in order to widen the horizons of individual practice.

On completion of the course, students should:

• Have developed and refined individual leadership abilities and capacities for initiating and realising projects in theatre practice;
• Have significantly advanced their skills and expertise in aspects fundamental to their primary arts practice – namely directing or performance creation - such that they would be ready to work at a professional level;
• Have developed the capacity to evaluate, discriminate and make informed choices as part of theatre practice within aesthetic domains;
• Be able to conceptualise, realise and present original theatre and/or theatrically aligned projects;
• Demonstrate highly developed problem solving abilities and flexibility of approach;
• Have developed the skills of articulating the ideas and processes inherent in their creative work within the context of relevant artistic discourse and research;
• Demonstrate a working knowledge of quantitative and qualitative Research processes;
• Have developed their skills in collaborating with other theatre artists (actors, designers, technical personnel) in the realisation of a theatre project, such that they would be ready to work at a professional level.

Master of Theatre Practice

• Successful completion of the Postgraduate Diploma in Performance Creation from the VCA with at least H2B grades across the course and an H1 in Applied Project B.
• Applicants with an equivalent qualification from another institution must have equivalent grades across the course and a high honours in the main practical subject.

On completion of this course, students should:

• Be able to work collaboratively with fellow artists in the realisation of a creative project;
• Exhibit leadership capacity, including a willingness and ability to engage in constructive peer discourse and contribute by acting as a mentor to the development of others;
• Demonstrate an understanding of their arts practice within the context of wider aesthetic and social domains;
• Demonstrate knowledge of research paradigms, sufficient to allow them to advance to higher levels of academic research in praxis and theory;
• Exhibit a profound respect for truth and intellectual integrity and for the ethics of professional creative practice;
• Be able to contribute through leadership, research, performance development and/or pedagogy to Australian culture in the arts, in particular those aspects of culture and society that lie outside the dominant paradigms.