Birkbeck and Camden People’s Theatre announce a new collaboration
From the autumn term this year, Birkbeck’s MA Text and Performance degree will be delivered in association with Camden People’s Theatre and guest artists.
Birkbeck has announced an exciting new collaboration with Camden People’s Theatre, combining the practical and academic exploration of theatre and performance. From the autumn term this year, Birkbeck’s MA Text and Performance degree will be delivered in association with Camden People’s Theatre and guest artists, a partnership which will equip students with a broad range of highly employable skills.
Camden People’s Theatre will lead a theatre making project with Birkbeck students, with their final performance projects presented in the theatre. Students will also be offered a range of technical skills training and professional development opportunities, as well as privileged access to the theatre’s newly refurbished building which is a ten-minute walk from Birkbeck’s School of Arts and includes a 65-seat theatre, large rehearsal and work spaces, a café and social hub.
Professor Fintan Walsh, Director of Birkbeck’s MA Text and Performance degree, said: “I am delighted that Birkbeck will collaborate with Camden People’s Theatre in the delivery of our MA Text and Performance degree. This is an ideal time to work with an industry partner in the provision of our long-standing Master’s degree, to ensure students have the chance to make theatre in a professional context with access to invaluable career development opportunities and excellent resources. Camden People’s Theatre champions experimental performance by emerging theatre makers, that grapples with some of the most exciting ideas and urgent issues of our times, and we are thrilled to be able to share these opportunities with our students.”
On behalf of Camden People’s Theatre, Artistic Director Brian Logan, commented: “All of us at Camden People’s Theatre are delighted to be embarking on this partnership with Birkbeck, with whom we’ve enjoyed a fantastic neighbourly relationship for several years. This new collaboration builds on that, and takes the work Camden People’s Theatre does with early-career artists in an exciting new direction.
The whole point of Camden People’s Theatre is to help new creatives and thinkers get a foothold in our industry – and open up that industry to the talents we support, and to their endlessly refreshing new ideas about what theatre is and can be. We’re really looking forward to welcoming Birkbeck and its students into this environment, where theatre and performance are reinvented on the hoof, and both are applied to that thorny problem of bringing into being a better world.”
Birkbeck has a long history of collaborating with Camden People’s Theatre. Both Brian Logan and Executive Director Kaya Stanley-Money are Fellows of Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Theatre.
Camden People’s Theatre was founded in 1994, with a mission “to support early-career artists making unconventional theatre – particularly those whose work explores issues that matter to people now”.