Applications for MA Interdisciplinary Dance Performance are open. Create brand new interdisciplinary work with world-renowned artists and companies and develop your own creative practice.
In 2024/25 students on this MA course will be joined by guest companies/artists:
Florence Peake - co-create and perform in a durational gallery installation
Complicité Theatre - co-create and perform a new 60-minute full-length stage production
Benji Reid - co-create a unique immersive photographic exhibition exploring the body as a canvas
Florence Peake is a London-based artist who has been making work since 1995. She makes solo and group performance works intertwined with an extensive visual art practice. Presenting work internationally and across the UK in galleries, theatres and the public realm. Peake’s practice uses movement, text, film, drawing, painting and sculpture that respond and intercept each other to articulate, extend and push ideas through diverse media. By encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and material, she creates radical and outlandish performances, creating temporary alliances and micro-communities within the audience.
Peake has exhibited and presented performance at: National Gallery (2021), touring to Southwark Park Galleries (2023), Fruit Market Edinburgh (2023), Towner Hayward Eastbourne (2024). Hayward Gallery’s touring British Art Show 9 (2021). Groupius Bae, Berlin (2022) Venice Biennale 2019; CRAC Occitanie, Sète, France (2018), London Contemporary Music Festival, UK (2018), De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK (2018); Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France (2018); Hayward Gallery, London UK (2018), Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2017); Serpentine, London UK (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2016); ICA, London (2016); Modern Art Oxford (2016); BALTIC, Newcastle UK (2013), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2012).
Complicité is an international touring theatre company based in London led by Artistic Director and co-founder Simon McBurney. Complicité creates work that strengthens human interconnection, using the complicity between performer and audience that is at the heart of the theatrical experience. Complicité works across art forms, believing theatre, opera, film, radio, installation, publication and participatory arts can all be sites for the collective act of imagination.
Complicité’s recent work includes Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Figures in Extinction [1.0], Can I Live?, The Encounter, The Master and Margarita, Shun-kin and A Disappearing Number, as well as The Dark is Rising, a new audio drama for BBC World Service and BBC Sounds based on Susan Cooper’s cult novel. Founded in 1983, the Company has won over 50 major theatre awards worldwide, and played in more than 40 countries.
Complicité began life as a collective and this spirit of collective enquiry and collaborative curiosity has driven the work throughout its history. The Company is famous for making its work through extensive periods of research and development which brings together specialists from diverse fields to create the works – a process now known simply as ‘devising’.
Alongside Simon McBurney’s work the Company supports artists through the ‘Mudlarks’ strand. The Company is committed to widening access and pro-actively seeks to support talented artists who are under-represented in the theatre sector. Learning and engagement are central to its work and its award-winning Creative Engagement programme includes professional development, work in schools and colleges and participatory projects with a range of communities.
The Company is committed to responding to the climate and ecological emergency. It is a founder member of Culture Declares Emergency and co-chairs a working group of UK Touring Theatre Companies to share best sustainable practice and to develop the Theatre Green Book Touring Guidance.
See previous workBenji Reid, born in 1966, is a British photographer, visual theatre maker, and educator renowned for his compelling exploration of race, nationhood, gender, and the Black British experience. With a keen focus on Black masculinity and mental health, Reid’s work pushes the boundaries of artistic expression. He coined the term “Choreo-photolist” to describe his unique practice, which seamlessly merges theatre and choreography into his photography.
In 2020, Benji Reid received widespread recognition when his photograph Holding on to Daddy secured the Welcome Photography Prize in the Mental Health category. His innovative approach to art and storytelling has led to exhibitions worldwide, and his recent work, such as Find Your Eyes in 2023, continues to captivate audiences, combining dance, theatre, and photography to shed light on important social issues and celebrate the complexity of Black masculinity and fatherhood.
