Master of Arts (by coursework & dissertation) — Dramaturgy postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every Monday for six weeks last winter, the same woman came into the print-and-copy shop where I work and asked for twelve copies of a script. It was a nativity play written by her church drama group, and each week it had changed. A shepherd's speech disappeared. A scene moved from the inn to the road outside. By the fourth week a new narrator had appeared, apparently because a young member was too shy to act but wanted a part. I was only stapling pages, but I found myself reading each version at the counter to see what they had decided. That small archive of drafts showed a group thinking through who was in the room, what the audience needed to follow and where the story's weight should fall. That is the work I want to study properly as a dramaturg.

My degree in English and Theatre gave me the foundations. I was strongest in courses on dramatic structure and on South African theatre after 1970, where I wrote an essay on how Sizwe Bansi Is Dead was developed by Athol Fugard with John Kani and Winston Ntshona. What interested me was the question of authorship when a text grows from performers' own experience, and how a script can carry traces of the rehearsal room. Reading Cathy Turner and Synne Behrndt's Dramaturgy and Performance afterwards helped me see that this question sits at the centre of the discipline rather than at its edges.

In my final year I worked as student dramaturg on an adaptation of a short story about a family running a spaza shop, which a classmate was directing for our end-of-year programme. I prepared a research pack on informal trading and the period, but the more useful part of my role turned out to be keeping a rehearsal log. When the actors began to lose the thread of a long middle section, I could show the director, from my notes, that the story's central decision had been cut in week two. We restored a reworked version of that moment and the scene held together. I also wrote the programme note and led a short discussion with the audience on the final night. The production was modest, but it taught me that dramaturgy is often about memory: holding on to what a piece set out to do while it changes.

Since graduating I have worked full-time at the copy shop, and the job has been more useful than I expected. I handle print orders for students, small businesses and community groups, which means turning half-finished ideas into something readable, often against a deadline. I have learnt to ask practical questions quickly and to explain why a layout will or will not work without making anyone feel foolish.

On Saturday mornings I read at my local library's story hour for children aged four to eight. Choosing books that work aloud, and noticing when a room of small listeners drifts, has sharpened my sense of pace in a way no essay did. I also play in a social netball league, which has nothing to do with theatre and is mainly a reason to spend an evening away from screens and paper.

At postgraduate level I want to develop the critical and practical skills to work alongside writers and directors on new work, particularly devised and adapted pieces where questions of voice and ownership are live. I am interested in how dramaturgs document a process, and I would like my dissertation to explore rehearsal records as a form of dramaturgical thinking. I bring careful reading, steady organisation and some experience of being useful in a rehearsal room without taking it over. I would now like the structured study and supervision to build on that seriously.