Master of Arts (Performing Arts)

The Master of Arts (Performing Arts)offered at Edith Cowan University is primarily aimed at high-level researchers, critics and practitioners from a wide cross-section of the arts community who wish to extend their independent capacity to operate in an increasingly multi-art form and technologically-based profession.

Students may be required to research, devise and produce new works of art, or develop new approaches to arts practice and/or its critical and social contexts and meaning (depending on the specific research project entailed). It is expected that any such arts practice will be a contemporary expression leading towards new insights in the selected field of study. The work will be exploratory, frequently based around emerging methodologies of arts research, leading usually to a performance, presentation, exhibition or publication of significance.

Specifically, the Master of Arts (Performing Arts) offered at Edith Cowan University aims to create opportunities for innovation and creativity in the arts; use the resources of the Academy to create leadership opportunities for people who can offer the arts informed direction, and identifiable and marketable skills, to advance the Australian cultural environment into the next decade; provide opportunities for people from diverse ethnic and creative arts backgrounds to synthesise disparate artistic skills to produce innovative and creative outcomes for the arts industry; and build upon and extend the traditions and conventions of the student's earlier training to create new knowledge for the arts.

Course Learning Outcomes

• Apply cognitive, technical, and creative skills to investigate complex ideas and concepts in the design, execution, and critical examination of research activities

• Apply communication skills to analyse and disseminate research through disciplinary mediums (including artistic outputs where appropriate) in order to make a contribution to knowledge in a specific area of performing arts.

• Demonstrate ethical accountability, as well as an awareness of cross-cultural sensitivities, global perspectives, and emergent issues or practices.

• Demonstrate the ability to integrate theoretical and technical knowledge in the advancement of conceptual understandings and creative practice, and to work both independently and collaboratively, as required.

• Reflect critically on a complex body of discipline knowledge, research principles, and methods to demonstrate mastery in a specific area of the performing arts.

• Use high-level self-management skills to [plan and execute] a substantial piece of research.

Courses include:

• Literature Review

• Performing Arts Research Preparation

• Masters Thesis