Collaborative arrangements

We have various collaborative arrangements with other institutions:

The Department's Theatre Directing MFA (which ran for the first time in 2004-5) operates in collaboration with a large number of theatre companies and external institutions.
The National Council for Drama Training, in conjunction with Arts Council England, the Theatre Managers’ Association and Equity, were joint founders of the MFA at Birkbeck and continue to offer professional advice on a regular basis.
Students have had placements at 26 of the country’s leading theatres and drama schools, including the RSC, the National Theatre Studio, The Royal Court, the Gate, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, the Sheffield Crucible, the Stephen Joseph Theatre, the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, RADA, and the Motley Design School.
The MA in Creative Producing, launched in October 2008, is operated in association with the Theatre Royal Stratford East. The Programme’s collaborative features include the extensive direct input of professional practitioners, the establishment of mentoring relationships between students and committed professional practitioners, and industrial secondment opportunities.

The department provides other opportunities for study at postgraduate level under the aegis of the London Consortium, which is a collaborative partnership between the Architectural Association, the TATE, the Institute for Contemporary Arts, and Birkbeck.
In 2007 the Department was successful in securing an AHRC collaborative doctoral award in partnership with the Theatre Collections at the V&A for a PhD study of the history of the Tricycle Theatre. The AHRC requires the two institutions participating in these collaborative doctorates to produce a detailed partnership agreement, covering issues such as training, timing of supervisions, ethical questions and intellectual property rights before the commencement of the award.

Other recent and ongoing projects being carried out in partnership with external institutions include:

a postgraduate song-writing project with the Wigmore Hall and the department’s Contemporary Poetics Research Centre
‘Translated Acts’, a collaboration between Central St Martins, Southampton Centre for Contemporary Writing and the Poetics Centre, which addresses practice-led research and its generation of new cross-arts and cross-media languages
‘Transcriptions: Writing’, a collaboration with the National Gallery in which MA Creative Writing students were invited to produce a short fiction response to a painting of their choice in the Gallery’s collection

Conferences and events hosted in collaboration with external institutions organised by members of the Department's staff also feed into the life of the Department and the opportunities available for postgraduate students. Recent events include:

an interdisciplinary conference on the work of Samuel Beckett, hosted jointly by Birkbeck, the Tate Modern, and the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Enterprise
a three-day conference titled ‘Art and Science Now: The Two Cultures in Question’, which brought together the Science Museum, Tate Modern, the Wellcome Trust and Birkbeck
an exhibition with the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia
a conference with the Jewish Museum in Camden, London