Course units
Unit 1: Elements of puppetry
This unit will explore the art of puppetry in relation to 3 key relationships of performance making: audiences, aesthetics and forms.
You'll investigate these through practical projects and performances. Seminars, lectures and workshops will focus on the key roles that are central to crafting puppet performance. You will develop a deeper understanding of the 3 specialist areas within the profession: performance, designing and fabricating, and theatre-making.
You will learn how to document, critique and demonstrate your research and methodologies. You will explore effective and creative approaches to presenting your work. With your tutor, you will establish a Learning Agreement for the year. This will be developed into your final project in Unit 4.
Unit 2: Developing your practice
This unit introduces you to more puppet-making and devising techniques and materials. You will focus on and interrogate specific aspects of puppetry that reflect your interests.
You will develop a critical understanding of dramaturgy, visual storytelling, and the forms, conventions, and ethics of cabaret performance.
Responding to a chosen sociopolitical or autoethnographic enquiry, you will devise a solo or small-group cabaret performance, fabricate and realise a puppet or performance object, and develop design choices that reflect function while considering safe and sustainable materials. You will evaluate context and scale in relation to performance environments and critically assess the ethical and social implications of your artistic, design, and performance decisions.
The unit concludes in a group project with the design of a collaboratively curated and compered cabaret performance event. You will document your learning through a research and practice portfolio and undertake a critical research project that develops and articulates a thorough understanding of a key artist, technique, or process in puppetry, strengthening your engagement with creative research methodologies.
Unit 3: Research through practice
In this unit, you will develop your practice through a collaborative research project with other Wimbledon MA performance-based courses. Focusing on a specific area of interest, you will undertake a collaborative creative research project which could serve as a foundation for your practical and/or written work in Unit 4.
Unit 4: Realisation
In the final unit you will work on an in-depth personal project. This will demonstrate an advanced level of puppetry practice that will challenge or expand the boundaries of existing performance practices.
You will develop your professional interests and relate your own work to a critical understanding of current and historical practices and methodologies. Completing your research and practice portfolio of work will allow you to position yourself in the field as a practitioner or researcher.
Your creative research will challenge and interrogate existing practices to a professional level. It will reflect on the future of puppetry and look to new forms of making, devising and developing your own artistic vision.
Your process will engage with sustainable, socially engaged and ethical methods of production. It will show an understanding of the relationship between audiences, aesthetics and forms.
Your project will culminate in a presentation in which you will take on one or more of the key puppetry roles explored in Unit 1. You will further your collaborative skills by inclusively leading peers and bringing together a group to realise your personal project. This will demonstrate proactivity, agility, craft, effective communication and storytelling skills.
Note: 120 Credits must be passed before the final unit is undertaken.
