What is CPPM?

CPPM is the international MA in Contemporary Physical Performance Making at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre in Tallinn, taught entirely in English. It is a maker’s training: two years in the studio, building performance with your body and your collaborators rather than writing about it at a desk. Theatre, dance, circus and performance art all arrive here and none of them owns the room.

We take sixteen artists, once. One cohort at a time, two years, and then we stop for a semester before the next one begins. Everything else on this page follows from that decision.

The room you grow in

We built CPPM on a single bet: you grow fastest in a room with extraordinary artists. The choreographers, directors and companies who shaped contemporary performance come to CPPM and teach, in person, for weeks at a time, with the methods they built their own work with. In recent years that has meant working directly with Lloyd Newson of DV8 Physical Theatre, Wim Vandekeybus of Ultima Vez, Amit Lahav of Gecko, Eddie Martinez of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Guillermo Gómez-Peña of La Pocha Nostra, Imanuel Schipper of Rimini Protokoll, Grzegorz Bral of Song of the Goat and the performance artist Olivier de Sagazan, among many others. Who has taught here, and who is teaching this intake, is on the Teaching Team page.

They ask of you what they ask in their own rehearsal rooms, and they give you what they give their own companies. Bring your nerve. It will be met with generosity.

What our graduates have done

The course is young: our first cohort arrived in 2019, and the sixteen in the studio now are only our third. Two cohorts have graduated so far, twenty-three artists in all, the first of them only in 2021. We keep track of every one, because the answer is the course’s real report card.

Iveta Pole was already a leading actress in Latvia when she set it down to come here. After graduating she went on making work with her CPPM classmates: her first production after the MA, Malleus Maleficarum, co-created with two of them, took Best Large-Scale Production at Spēlmaņu nakts, Latvia’s national theatre award, in Riga, the first production from outside the state theatres ever to win that category.

Keithy Kuuspu won the Kristallkingake, the national award for a young performance artist’s first significant work, for False Falling, the piece she premiered at Manifestal, and then took the Estonian Cultural Endowment’s main prize in visual and applied arts for 2025. This year the Estonian performing arts award asked her to chair its jury.

Liisa Saaremäel came from Estonian theatre and built her first own works here. Larger Than Life, the production she premiered at Manifestal, won the Estonian performing arts award in 2022, and she now holds a salaried post performing and directing at Von Krahl Theatre, with Estonia’s pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale among her credits.

Javier Cárcel Hidalgo-Saavedra came from Spain as a physical-theatre actor and became the academy’s first doctoral candidate in performance making. He assistant-directed FARRA at Spain’s national classical theatre company, which won the Premio MAX in 2025.

Marshall Stay came from Australia and now works in London, from the West End to national tours, Kip Williams’ Dracula among his credits and an Arts Council England grant behind him. Amy Reade directs in the UK, selected for Headlong’s Origins directing scheme at the Oxford Playhouse, and remains an associate artist of Good Chance Theatre. Seohwon Ji returned to Seoul, where he works as an artist, performer and teacher.

The full picture, name by name, is on the Alumni page.

How we train makers

Our understanding of performance is deliberately wild. It runs from post-dramatic theatre to immersive worlds, from installation and durational work to political performance. The guest roster carries that territory, and it is never fixed. Before every intake we curate it afresh, choosing the artists we currently find most exciting and relevant, each one unlike the others in process and outcome. CPPM is a curated master’s programme twice over, in its guests and in its students, and no two cohorts ever receive the same course. We could settle on a formula that works. We think a formula that works is how a course stops being alive.

The chain of workshops is built to shake you. Each guest arrives with a method the previous one would argue with. You are deliberately immersed in ways of working that contradict and challenge each other.

No one is left alone in it. The permanent core team, Jüri Nael, Giacomo Veronesi and Sandra Nicole Küpper, walks the whole two years with you, in journals, seminars and tutorials, helping you make sense of each collision in relation to your own practice.

Not a desk and a thesis

This is not a desk and a thesis. If that is what you want, there are excellent programmes for it. What you get here is two years in practice, led company by company and method by method. One month you are inside a company’s method from morning to evening. The next you are alone in the studio with your own material, and the room is yours. None of that closes the academic door behind you. The degree is a full-time postgraduate Master of Arts of 120 ECTS, recognised across Europe, and it opens the same doors: Javier Cárcel went from this course straight into doctoral research, and that door stays open for every graduate.

How the two years are built

We organise the two years differently from most schools. Semesters run as four-month intensives, and every intensive is followed by a three-month break. The intensives take everything you have, and they mean it: long days in the studio, six of them a week, training inside a guest company’s method, making your own work under its pressure, performing what you made. Then the next company arrives and it begins again. Weeks end in showings, months end in premieres. It may be the fullest artistic life you have ever lived. Nobody could live it without pause.

The breaks give it back. Students go home, work, return to their own artistic communities and push their own projects forward, because we refuse to pull an artist entirely out of their practice and their livelihood for two years. You remain a full-time student through every break, with everything that status protects. The course should feed your artistic life, not replace it.

There is more inside the two years than fits on this page: theatre research methods, contextual studies, creative projects and electives, all built for emerging makers. But the experience we want you to have is not the experience of being a student. It is being an artist, in a collective residency with fifteen others, with nothing in the foreground but your own work and your own development. Everything a national university carries sits behind that, in place and properly kept, the accreditation your diploma holds, the enrolment your visa and your funding rest on, the whole machinery running quietly so you never have to look at it. You should feel like an artist here, because that is what you came here for.

The full architecture is on the Curriculum page.

Growth needs an audience

Then there is the audience. You meet it constantly. Every workshop ends with an open class. EXPROMT nights test raw creativity live. Two festivals exist purely for CPPM students, LÄBU for the solos and Manifestal for the master’s works. Last year that added up to more than fifty public events and performances, a producing house’s year, made by sixteen people. By graduation, an audience is not an occasion. It is a habit. See what that looks like on the Projects page.

The people you grow with

For us, a cohort is an artistic community, and we choose it that way. Every cohort is composed so its members can work together, challenge each other, and keep each other going when the work gets hard, because it will. For two years these people are your collaborators, your sharpest critics and your first audience. You get everything a real artistic community brings, the generosity and the friction, the collaborations and the collisions. We would not remove the friction if we could. It is where half the growth lives. When friction becomes a real storm, nobody weathers it alone. The core team holds the hard moments too.

Who is it for

The formal requirement is one: a completed bachelor’s degree, in any subject. Everything after that is a question of readiness rather than pedigree.

We recruit worldwide and we mean it literally. Across our intakes, applications have come from 29 nationalities, and the artists we accepted have come from 22 countries on six continents. The current cohort holds sixteen artists from thirteen countries on five continents: Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, Greece, Romania, China, India, Colombia, the United States and Australia. Ten hold EU or EEA citizenship and six do not. The working language is English throughout, and for most of the room it is not their first.

There is no upper age limit, and there never has been. This year the youngest arrived at twenty-three. The eldest arrived at forty-six, with twenty-four years on a national stage and more than seventy roles behind her. The median is twenty-seven. Across our intakes the range runs from twenty-two to forty-six, and we would rather have that spread in the room than a single generation agreeing with itself. Highly experienced artists are strongly encouraged to apply.

Where our artists come from

They arrive from dance, acting, choreography, circus, physical theatre, performance art, directing and playwriting, and from further afield than that: semiotics, architecture, English literature, film curation, traditional Korean music, music production, marine navigation and theology. In the current cohort, six came as emerging artists, five as established professionals, three straight from a first degree, and two changed career outright to be here.

What that looks like in practice for the 2025-27 cohort: a national theatre actor of twenty-four years, here to move into directing. A semiotician and poet, a year out of her bachelor’s degree. An architect who retrained into a performance artist through years of workshops and studio practice. A company dancer from Beijing who spent four years inside China’s leading contemporary companies and left to learn to make his own work. A movement artist from Riga who performs in Latvian theatre productions and co-founded a dance collective with his fellow graduates. An actor who is also a ship’s navigator and a theologian. A RADA-trained actor who runs an award-winning refugee arts charity. A musical-theatre performer who co-founded one of Finland’s leading contemporary circus companies. A Colombian performing artist who is actor, dancer, director and producer at once. A Cambridge literature graduate running her own dance-theatre company. The full sixteen, in their own words, are on the Current Students page.

The course is highly physical and everyone works within their own capacity. We are not scanning for a body type or a technique, and there is no house style to fit. If you think your background does not fit a category, you may be exactly who we are looking for.

Who finds it hard

We should say plainly who finds this hard. Artists who want their existing practice confirmed rather than taken apart tend to have a difficult two years here, and so do people who would rather work alone. The course asks you to be dismantled in public, in front of the same fifteen people, repeatedly. That is the deal, and it is not for everyone.

What you leave with: your own voice

None of this exists so you can imitate anyone, and we can prove it. Manifestal is the festival where each cohort’s master’s works premiere. Two editions in, it reads like a dare. Shame, staged as a committee watching your every move. Spain’s four thousand mass graves. Female rage. The price tag on being human. The life of bees. A choreographic opera with a cast of thirty-six. Audio walks whispered across Tallinn. A dinner party about power and toxic love. An exhibition of everything one artist never showed. The Von Krahl stage one night, the ruins of Ungru castle the next. A cooperative of 1,300 garages. A secret location, coordinates sent to ticket holders, one performance at three in the morning. An industrial ash mountain, the audience bused in from the academy’s door.

Each edition is made by one cohort: thirteen premieres from the first, fourteen from the second. These artists trained together for two years, same rooms, same guests, same storms. They shared everything except their own artistic voice. Then they walked out in twenty-seven different directions, and no one could mistake them for children of the same family.

Your own way of making

What you leave with is the one thing nobody can teach you. It is your own way of making. Everything else, the encounters, the methods, the obstacles and the breakthroughs, is scaffolding.

How to get in, and how we help you afford it

And we come to you. Selection happens through auditions, and we take them as far around the world as we can. We have held live auditions in Seoul, Melbourne, São Paulo, New York, London, Berlin and Tallinn, and the map is not finished. We cannot reach everywhere every time, so new cities join with each intake, and the online option exists for everyone we have not yet reached, across time zones, because talent should not depend on the price of a flight.

An audition here is not a ten-minute slot. Live or online, it usually runs over several days of working together, because it is a meeting. You are finding out about us as much as we are finding out about you, and what we are both looking for is a match. The application itself also takes time to prepare well, and the whole process, step by step with the documents we ask for, is laid out on the Apply page.

Affording the course matters to us just as much, and we put money behind that. In every intake, half the places carry support: eight of the sixteen artists study with a partial tuition scholarship, awarded on talent alone, held for artists who could not otherwise come. If a scholarship is offered, it arrives together with your acceptance letter, so you know the whole picture before you say yes. Tuition fees, how the scholarships work, and what living in Tallinn costs are laid out on the Course Detail page, and for the many graduates who have chosen to stay in Estonia and the EU after the course, the same page points to the visa routes.

Two years that are entirely yours

The refusal this page opened with is the one to end on, because in higher education it is the rarest. We never overlap cohorts. When a cohort arrives, it gets everything: the whole team, all of our attention and all of our resources belong to those sixteen artists for two full years. When they graduate, we stop and take a breath, usually for a semester, because the next cohort deserves the same preparation and the same undivided attention. Running intakes back to back would be easier. To do this fully and do it well, with all the care it asks for, you take one cohort at a time.

So there are sixteen places. Applications are not open yet. Leave your email and we will tell you the moment they are.

Questions people ask about CPPM

What is CPPM?

CPPM is the international MA in Contemporary Physical Performance Making at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre in Tallinn. It is a two-year, English-taught maker’s training in the studio, where theatre, dance, circus and performance art meet and none of them owns the room.

Is it a theatre degree, a dance degree or a contemporary performance art degree?

All of them and none. The course trains makers of performance rather than interpreters of one discipline. Artists arrive from acting, dance, choreography, circus, physical theatre, performance art, directing and playwriting, and from further afield, and leave with their own way of making. The degree is a full Master of Arts of 120 ECTS.

Who teaches at CPPM?

The artists who shaped contemporary performance, teaching in person for weeks at a time with the methods they built their own work with, and a permanent core team that walks the whole two years with every cohort. Who has taught here and who is teaching this intake, name by name, is on the Teaching Team page.

Who is CPPM for?

Anyone with a completed bachelor’s degree in any subject who is ready to have their practice taken apart and rebuilt in front of fifteen peers. There is no upper age limit: across our intakes the range has run from twenty-two to forty-six, and applications have come from 29 nationalities. Artists who want their existing practice confirmed rather than challenged tend to find it hard.

Is CPPM a research degree?

No. It is not a desk and a thesis. It is two years in practice, led company by company and method by method, inside a full-time postgraduate MA. The academic door stays open afterwards: one graduate went from the course straight into doctoral research.

Why does CPPM take only one cohort at a time?

Because sixteen artists deserve the whole team, all of our attention and all of our resources for two full years. When a cohort graduates we pause, usually for a semester, before the next one begins. Back-to-back intakes would be simpler to run. Doing this fully means one cohort at a time.

How do I apply, and is there financial support?

Through an audition, live or online, which is a meeting over several days rather than a ten-minute slot. Half the places in every intake carry a partial tuition scholarship, awarded on talent alone. The process, step by step, is on the Apply page, and fees, scholarships and the cost of living in Tallinn are on the Course Detail page. Applications for the next intake are not open yet. Leave your email above and we will tell you the moment they are.

Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre

The Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre (EAMT) is a public university offering higher education in all major fields of music and theatre through bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programmes.

With approximately 700 students, it is the smallest among the six Estonian public universities; however, it boasts the highest percentage of international students. In 2021, EAMT was, for the third year in a row, included in the QS World University Ranking, one of the top international ranking systems measuring the popularity and performance of global universities. Studying at EAMT means you will be part of an institution that values and maintains the academic traditions of European music and theatre education while being open to modern developments in the field. It offers excellent teaching facilities, a staff-student ratio, and attention towards your development needs as an individual artist.