Digital Participatory Theatre: Forum Theatre

Following on from the first series of ‘Open Playground’ events, we are excited to host four new events providing an online space in which participatory theatre makers and facilitators can connect with their peers and try out new ideas.

In response to practitioners who attended the first ‘Open Playground’ events, each new playground will focus on a different form of participatory theatre with an emphasis on exploring the possibilities of delivering these forms online (full details below):

Playback Theatre (22nd October)

Living Newspaper (29th October)

Forum Theatre (5th November)

Devising (12th November)

Each ‘Open Playground’ will be facilitated by a member of the Collective Encounters’ team, with contributions from a guest practitioner. These sessions will go beyond workshop games to explore how practitioners are delivering the fundamentals of these forms online.

These ‘Open Playground’ events are not training events but facilitated forums in which new and emerging practice can be tested and shared.

For background information on some of the challenges and unexpected benefits of delivering participatory theatre online please read: Delivering Participatory Theatre During Social Distancing: What’s Working?

These ‘Open Playground’ events form part of Collective Encounters Centre for Excellence in Participatory Theatre sector support programme during COVID-19.

5 November: Forum Theatre with Katy Rubin

Forum Theatre is a participatory theatre technique created by Augusto Boal, under the umbrella of Theatre of the Oppressed. In Forum Theatre actors present an original play ‘chronicling an unresolved problem resulting from systemic oppression’. Facilitated by a ‘Joker’, a series of interactive interventions follow the Forum performance. The audience directly influence and change what is happening onstage and so are active participants in finding solutions to the problems presented. The aim of Forum Theatre is to empower audiences, now ‘spec-actors’, with tools to fight and address the challenges they face.

Katy Rubin is founder and former Executive Director for Theatre of the Oppressed New York, “a nonprofit organization that partners with communities facing discrimination to spark transformative action”. Katy trained with Augusto Boal in Brazil and has facilitated Theatre of the Oppressed projects with activists and artists internationally and across the US over the past decade.

You will be sent a link to the zoom session after registering online.