The course is open to potential makers of circus work, and we are not prescriptive in what forms a ‘good’ director of circus. There are always logistical challenges – we need space and time for circus to breathe, and this is also a financial question – but the field needs new work, and the course is designed to push you into new areas of making circus.

MAKING is the key word here and, rather than focus on established ideas of what a director should ‘look like’, the course is designed to allow for new encounters between a singular voice, an ensemble, and an audience.

It may be that you are a director who has mainly worked with dance or theatre, or visual arts, and want to deepen your work in an exciting new area. It may be that you are currently still a performer who wants to research how better to make work with others when your vision for circus is centralised as a proposal or provocation. It may be that you are a member of a circus ensemble or company who wants to likewise deepen their ability and voice within that existing group.

Currently, the industry is home to many new companies, collectives, and ensembles, all with different desires to utilise circus ‘play’, physicality and forms to challenge the normative practices of making work. The course is open to those who may already be embedded in a company and who want to invest in a deep research dive into the practices of directing, curating and organising the production of new circus work at a professional level. Regardless of whether you intend to set up your group as a growing business or if you wish to engage with the current available funding streams, this MA will better prepare you to make work that is grounded in rigorous, logistically aware research practices and is also hopefully more aware of the discourses that influence and enclose the practices that might inform your future work.

You may wish to continue with your own performance practice in the work that you make, and you may even be certain that this personal practice forms an integral part of your creative intentions. You may be a graduate of a BA course in circus, still enjoying your circus practice but looking to deepen your activity as an author of physical work.

So, it may be that you have no intention of hanging up your hat as a performer. The point about the MA in directing is that we do not exclude performers from directing work in which they themselves are performing. You are welcome to explore the challenges and potentialities of being a circus body within an ensemble that you are leading. Performing in the pieces that you make only requires you to rationalise the complexities of being included in that which you are directing. This can be done with our support, and there plenty of examples of performer/directors in a range of fields. In many ways it makes sense that researching through your practice to source directorial means should place you within the performance itself.

Whether this be in the explicit role of narrator, raconteur, ring mistress or master, clown, stand-up, host, presenter, lecturer or public speaker in whatever role or mode of characterisation you choose to adopt, or, alternatively, whether you are a more embedded member of the company who is interested to more discreetly devise, organise, interpret, and lead the work, this course can accommodate your creativity.