Performance studies personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

What draws me to performance studies is the idea that performance is not confined to a stage. Last winter my college ran a workshop on protest and procession, and afterwards I found myself noticing how much of ordinary life is staged: the way my manager adjusts her voice when a customer complains, the choreography of a bus queue, the rehearsed cheerfulness of a school open evening. I want to study a subject that takes these things seriously alongside plays and dance, and that treats making work and analysing it as two halves of the same question. My Drama A level introduced me to Brecht through Mother Courage and Her Children, and what stayed with me was less the politics than the technique of interruption: the refusal to let an audience settle. In Sociology I met Goffman's writing on the presentation of self, and the overlap between the two felt exciting rather than coincidental. I am not only interested in interpretation, though. I like being in a rehearsal room where an idea has to survive contact with bodies, timing and a leaking radiator. A course that asks me to read Bharucha or Schechner one week and build a durational piece the next seems the right place to develop both, and to test ideas I currently hold loosely.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A levels in Drama and Theatre, English Literature and Sociology have each shaped how I approach performance. In Drama I worked on Blood Wedding as a designer as well as a performer, which taught me to think about how sound and light carry meaning before any line is spoken; my written coursework on our devised piece pushed me to justify choices with evidence from rehearsal notes rather than instinct. English Literature has made me a slower, more careful reader. Studying A Streetcar Named Desire, I became interested in how stage directions function as instructions and as prose, and I wrote an essay comparing Williams's descriptive detail with the sparseness of the Beckett extracts we read for comparison. Sociology gave me vocabulary for institutions, roles and expectations, and the research methods unit was unexpectedly useful for performance work: I now think about interviews, observation and consent when a project involves real people's stories. Outside the syllabus I have been reading around the subject at my own pace, including Peggy Phelan's arguments about the disappearance of live performance, which I find persuasive but not entirely convincing when so much of what I watch survives as phone footage. I keep a notebook of performances I see, including unglamorous ones, with sketches of staging and questions I could not answer.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

For our summer showcase I proposed a site-based piece performed in and around the college's disused music block. I led a group of five, and most of my work was practical: measuring sightlines, timing the walk between rooms so an audience of twelve would not bunch up, and cutting fifteen minutes of text that worked on paper but not in a stairwell. We performed it four times and were asked to repeat it for an open evening, which felt like a genuine endorsement. On Saturdays I help at a youth drama club for eight to twelve year olds, mainly running warm-ups and supervising small group scenes. Explaining a status exercise to a nine-year-old has forced me to understand it properly, and I have learned to notice which children need a task rather than an instruction. My weekend job in a garden centre café has taught me things I did not expect to find relevant. Long shifts on the till require sustained attention and a steady manner when a queue builds, and covering the closing rota has made me reliable about time. I have also become quietly interested in how the space is arranged to move people past the plants, which is not far from thinking about audience routes. Together these commitments have given me stamina, organisation and a habit of watching how people behave in shared spaces.

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