Create innovative new theatre by cultivating your dramaturgical skills, performance training and critical thinking. Gain confidence in facilitation and community engagement to reach your audiences. Build your networks and industry knowledge through placement study. Emerge with a well-rounded skillset that prepares you to make, perform and facilitate creative work for the contemporary cultural environment.
Take time and space to develop your artistic voice by joining our MA Performance and Theatre Making. Firmly embedded in Kent’s thriving creative landscape, this course is aimed at graduates from theatre and performing arts degrees and other related subjects, as well as artists in theatre/performance who wish to take some time to develop or re-connect with their practice.
Whether you plan to work as a freelance artist, start a theatre company, or harness the power of the arts in other fields through your creative skillset, this intensive Masters’ prepares you through a holistic curriculum.
You will undertake performance training and develop your individual approach to dramaturgical practice in a range of forms, experimenting with elements of devising, writing, adaptation, or directorial/choreographic decision-making. To support your work as a ‘thinking practitioner’ you will also study the wider political, social and intellectual contexts of the field in Britain, Europe and beyond.
As the course progresses, you will conceive and realise more complex public-facing creative projects in your area of interest, and acquire best-practice skills in facilitation and inclusive audience/community engagement, in line with funders’ expectations. You will further apply and deepen your learning through placements or fieldwork study, alongside building your professional network and acquiring key skills in managing a creative career, such as marketing, branding, and developing funding applications. The course culminates in a theoretical or practical dissertation project, supported by supervision and completed through independent study and/or practice.
A wide range of expertise
You will benefit from studying with a staff team of leading specialists in the field of theatre and performance, whose teaching is informed by their own creative practice and world-leading research across subjects such as contemporary performance practice, psychophysical performance training, adaptation and translation, community/participatory performance, arts and health, comedy and popular performance, physical acting, Shakespeare, and European theatre.
Students regularly connect with our staffs’ exciting activities in a range of areas, including participatory dance theatre (Moving Memory); autism, identities and creativity (Playing A/Part); Chekhov technique in and beyond theatre (The Chekhov Collective UK); performances and special projects led by staff in partnership with professional companies (such as Good Chance’s Walk with Amal, and Projekt Europa’s Project Encounter); our Funny Rabbit Comedy Club; performance opportunities offered by the Gulbenkian Theatre; and much more.
Join a supportive creative community
Drama at Kent is distinctive for developing and supporting innovative arts professionals, both through our courses and our bespoke Graduate Theatre Company Scheme. We celebrate our alumni’s achievements and contributions to the arts and to communities, including Olivier Award winners, companies leading in inclusive theatre- and dance practice, internationally recognised playwrights and actors, industry-shaping producers, and so much more. You can hear from our alumni directly via our ProperJob Gradcast, the podcast that asks how Kent Drama alumni have built their career as artists.
Become part of a vibrant academic network
Postgraduate Drama and Theatre studies at Kent provide a vibrant hub for the development of creative practice and research. We encourage postgraduate students to make use of our close links and contacts with local, national and international (especially European) theatre companies, venues, artists and research projects, to enhance their research and professional development.
Drama at Kent was amongst the first Departments in the UK to offer, since the late 1990s, MA and PhD degrees by practice-as-research. Our international staff team of leading and emerging researchers and practitioners has an excellent reputation for research and supervision, ranking in the top ten of UK institutions for research excellence in Drama and Film in the latest Research Excellence Framework (2021).
Excellent facilities
The award-winning Jarman Building offers professional standard drama facilities, along with social spaces and a dedicated centre for postgraduate students. In addition to the two performance studios and the Gallery in the Jarman Building, Drama & Theatre facilities across the Canterbury campus include two further theatre spaces – the 113-seat Aphra Theatre (a courtyard-type gallery theatre space) and the Lumley Theatre, which is a flexible and adaptable studio space – as well as further rehearsal facilities in Eliot College and an extensively equipped construction workshop and costume collection.
A first or second class honours degree in a relevant subject (or equivalent)
All applicants are considered on an individual basis and additional qualifications, professional qualifications and relevant experience may also be taken into account when considering applications.
Please see our International Student website for entry requirements by country and other relevant information. Due to visa restrictions, students who require a student visa to study cannot study part-time unless undertaking a distance or blended-learning programme with no on-campus provision.
This course requires a Good level of English language, equivalent to B2 on CEFR.
Details on how to meet this requirement can be found on our English Language requirements webpage.
Examples:
IELTS 6.0 with a minimum of 5.5 in each component
PTE Academic 63 with a minimum of 59 in each sub-test
A degree from a UK university
A degree from a Majority English Speaking Country
Please note that if you are required to meet an English language condition, we offer a number of pre-sessional courses in English for Academic Purposes through Kent International Pathways.
We’ve created the most progressive approach to higher education, developing and modernising our curriculum. For 2025 our courses will be designed with you at their heart to deliver a top-class student experience and career outcomes.
The following modules are what students will typically study, but this may change year to year in response to new developments and innovations.
Through weekly workshops you will study and practice a range of approaches to performance training, building your skills in movement, breath and vocal work, use of the imagination, and embodiment of character. You will explore, discuss and experiment with psychophysical performance techniques influenced by the legacy of, for example, Michael Chekhov, Suzanne Bing, Jacques Lecoq, Konstantin Stanislavski and Jerzy Grotowski.
The module meets you where you are on your performance training journey. It invites you to bring your own background and previous training into dialogue with new approaches, and supports you to develop an independent way of working that suits your own creative voice. Practical workshops are integrated with reflection and discussion of related reading, and the module is assessed through a performance etude and a reflective learning portfolio.
Whether your future aim is performance, writing, directing or facilitating, this module will provide you with key skills and understanding of how to prepare for and realise performance. It will also give you important transferable skills around confident and persuasive communication, which are highly valued in a range of industries.
This intensive module takes the shape of a theatre lab, in which you will experiment with various dramaturgical approaches to storytelling in order to create new performance. In doing so, you will explore different roles and develop your independent creative practice in the context of collaborative work with your peers.
From site-specific and pop-up performance to adaptation of texts, weekly workshops will introduce you to a range of different practices and methods and the key practitioners associated with them, and will support you in your performance making. Your experiments will be guided by creative commissions designed to prepare you for work in professional contexts, with real-world constraints of time and budget. You will undertake independent rehearsal and research to underpin your process, and test your final work in front of an audience.
By the end of the module, you will have strengthened your understanding of your own creative voice and trajectory, and have developed key vocabularies, collaborative skills and organisational experience that enable you to meet the needs of, and contribute creatively to, the theatre industry and a range of other professions.
Creative work does not exist in a vacuum — its creation, reception, and the way it produces meaning are always shaped by context. Because of this, it is important to ask yourself what contexts you should be aware of as an artist, professional, scholar and global citizen, and to develop an understanding of the lenses through which we might critically examine creative work.
Through a series of lectures, screenings and seminars, you will learn to examine performance in context by studying a series of case studies in relation to key theoretical frameworks. You will consider performance through lenses such as postcolonialism, feminism and disability studies; discuss the relevance of ideologies and belief-systems; broaden your knowledge of practitioners and performance; and develop your ability to analyse and articulate ideas around creative work.
This module, which runs across two terms and is assessed through written coursework, will equip you with the knowledge, independent critical thinking skills and intercultural awareness required to become a successful player in the creative industries. It will also provide valuable preparation for your dissertation project.
Whether in theatre or other professions, few things are more important than the ability to competently, inclusively and sensitively hold a space. Whatever your specific interests are in the performance, theatre making and arts industries, this module will support your career plans by equipping you with a repertoire of professional facilitation techniques that can be applied in a range of different theatre, community, participatory, educational or arts-based environments.
In weekly practical workshops and through accompanying reading and discussion, you will engage with current debates around participatory theatre and associated ethical considerations. You will reflect upon, test and interrogate the efficacy of different facilitation techniques used by practitioners in their respective fields of work, and related principles around access and inclusion. By taking inspiration from what you discover, and practically testing ideas in a studio setting, you will establish your individual facilitation approach and a range of working methods to suit different environments.
You will acquire a highly desirable set of transferable skills, including the ability to be flexible and think on your feet in complex circumstances, to prepare inclusive and accessible spaces and activities, and to communicate confidently and sensitively with a range of audiences.
In this module you will be supported in conceiving, developing and realising a pre-professional performance or creative project that will be presented as part of a public Creative Festival at the end of the term.
Through regular workshops, supervised rehearsals, tutorials and work-in-progress showings you will establish first ideas, explore suitable creative approaches, test your work with audiences, and develop and manage a coherent final production.
As a key aspect of your project you will also undertake the independent research and practice required to inform both the content of your project and the form, style and approach you have chosen to work in.
By the end of the module, you will have taken responsibility for all aspects of devising and managing a new project within constraints of time and budget, which is a key transferable skill desired by a whole range of industries. You will also have developed a deeper understanding of your own artistic language and aims, and by creating and documenting your project you will have begun to build your creative portfolio.
Pursuing a career in the arts not only requires creativity and talent but also a solid understanding of key approaches to working in the arts industry.
In this module you will gain a deeper insight into the workings and operation of an arts organisation or company. You will have the opportunity to explore industry-related questions through work-based learning on an industry placement, or through in-depth study of an individual or company’s working processes. By doing so, you will gain new knowledge, and observe, test and reflect on how your existing knowledge is put into practice within the business.
Alongside the above, you will be supported in learning fundamental skills to prepare you for the industry, typically including topics such as how to approach prospective employers, writing CVs and personal statements, understanding and approaching funding and funding structures, writing grant applications, casting mechanisms, and fundamentals of marketing, branding and networking.
As a whole, the module allows you to begin to develop a career portfolio and position yourself in relation to a professional context, preparing you for life after University.
If you were given free rein to design your own theatre experiment or research project, what would it be? In this module you will spend two terms investigating your core interests and making your ideas happen – while always keeping an eye on ethical, practical and budgetary constraints. You will be given support and guidance to pursue your own creative and/or academic endeavours, be they a written dissertation, a practice as research project or a dissertation by practice.
You will develop an in-depth investigation into a specific topic, guided by research questions, establishing a dialogue with existing practices and debates. You will start by conceptualising your project and work with an assigned supervisor. You will present your work in progress to get feedback from your research community in Term 3, and then work on your final practice and/or written component, due in Term 4.
By building on research undertaken during your postgraduate course, you will design and undertake a new and complex piece of research that will allow you to position yourself at the forefront of the discipline and continue your career as an artist, theatre professional or scholar.
Assessment consists of 100% coursework, including essays, performances, funding budgets, reviews, written reflections on own practice, analysis of professional practice, presentations, reports, placements, practice-as-research portfolios.
For course aims and learning outcomes please see the course specification.
All students registered for a taught Master's programme are eligible to apply for a place on our Global Skills Award Programme. The programme is designed to broaden your understanding of global issues and current affairs as well as to develop personal skills which will enhance your employability.
Many career paths can benefit from the creative, practical and critical thinking skills that you develop as a postgraduate student on the MA Performance and Theatre Making. Students have gone on to work as performers, theatre-makers, directors, choreographers and playwrights; in the areas of creative producing, production management, technical management and design; in the fields of education, and community arts, and health and wellbeing; and many more.
The 2025/26 annual tuition fees for this course are:
For details of when and how to pay fees and charges, please see our Student Finance Guide.
Tuition fees may be increased in the second and subsequent years of your course. Detailed information on possible future increases in tuition fees is contained in the Tuition Fees Increase Policy. If you are uncertain about your fee status please contact information@kent.ac.uk.
The University will assess your fee status as part of the application process. If you are uncertain about your fee status you may wish to seek advice from UKCISA before applying.
For details of when and how to pay fees and charges, please see our Student Finance Guide.
Tuition fees may be increased in the second and subsequent years of your course. Detailed information on possible future increases in tuition fees is contained in the Tuition Fees Increase Policy. If you are uncertain about your fee status please contact information@kent.ac.uk.
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Next steps
Learn more about the application process or begin your application by clicking on a link below.
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