This course trains students for professional careers in the highly influential cutting edge area of international contemporary multimedia performance creation, and production.

It is centred around the practical creation, and production of multimedia performance works that challenge the boundaries of 21st century performance practice, and the cross-platform relationships between music, opera, the visual arts and theatre.

It gives students the unique opportunity to develop advanced multimedia performance, production, and audio/ visual technology skills, arming them with the necessary philosophical skills to further their abilities, and career opportunities, as thinking performance practitioners, and multimedia technicians.

The course enables both composers, singers, instrumentalists, performers, sound production practitioners, and visual artists, to develop career orientated transferable skills, and extended techniques, and approaches to their own specific core skills through multimedia practice. Students will gain a unique understanding of adapting to cross platform production, and sometimes conceptually challenging ideas behind multimedia and performance, and industries relevant to it.

This course is very much for those who are unafraid of challenging convention, and who wish to develop creative content beyond the remits of mainstream approaches to media, narrative, culture and performance.

As part of the original thinking behind this course structure, (divised as a post graduate post modern multimedia performance course for the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama), participating students have the unique opportunity to become associate performers of a professional resident multimedia performance touring production agency. This agency is part of an international performance resource network, with professional, educational, and cultural links across Europe, and further afield.

In tandem with the creation of new multimedia performance works, audio/ visual technology skills development sessions in computer aided composition, sound production, film making and stage production, run continuously throughout the course. Skills and techniques in these areas will be developed through the creative processes explored in the course.

The course focuses on 3 main areas of development:

1 Creation and production of new cross platform work in collaboration.

2 The development of advanced media (music, film and new media) technology skills through content creation.

3 The development of the student’s individual compositional, instrumental, performance, technology, and production skills, in the wider context of multimedia performance, the commercial international arts, and the media arena.

Multimedia Performance creation and production.

Working with the latest media production technologies, students develop and produce original multimedia works. These will explore the powerful communicative “cross boundary” relationships between media using the following ideas surrounding post modern arts practise as building blocks:

1) Non-representational approaches to 3 dimensional art and its role in multimedia.

Work will develop approaches surrounding the nature, possibilities or hidden potential of influences and contexts between opera and multimedia performance:

• Human condition and human movement in multimedia.

• Working with non-narrative narrative material between media. Deconstructing, constructing, and re-contextualising material by way of various applied postmodern concepts such as Bauhaus theatre, situationalism and other established ideas surrounding spatial relationships between media and a staged environment.

• Movement in media i.e.: movement in or “between” material and environmental elements, sound, film, physical movement, or mechanically controlled movement i.e. film as set design, sculpture, light, colour, kinetic and interactive art in multimedia performance.

• Structure and form between sound, 3 and 2 dimensions in staged or multimedia broadcast production (multimedia and 'musicfilm' i.e music video)

2) Counterpoint and juxtapositions of thematic, and sub-textual material across media.

Developing themes or “stories” as part of unusual, and original performed environments, using layered inter-relationships between movement, dramatic situation, theatrical abstraction, non-narrative and narrative approaches to text, electro-acoustic and digitally manipulated sound design, live music ensemble, voice (including opera), film as character and scenario development. set and lighting design, and film as set design

3) Finding unusual, and theatrically dynamic approaches which expose the nature of language, and extend it, sculpt it, accentuate it's sources (or sound), and it's rhythms, and it's metaphysicality as entertainment, art work or opera. Pushing language, and expression beyond the literal, into a new territory where meaning, and instinct become intertwined in a continuously moving psychological landscape, where situation and context are deliberately shifted, (using non-narrative form, structures and abstraction for example).