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Forum Theatre

UK Work Organisation Network Forum Theatre - engaging organisations with the  Arts

Forum Theatre is a powerful tool for stimulating reflection and action. 

UKWON has developed several techniques to assess and enhance the ‘communicative competence’ of organisations. Forum theatre, in which ‘fictional’ dilemmas are used to explore situations in participants’ own workplaces, is a particularly powerful tool for stimulating reflection and action. PLAY VIDEO below...

Forum theatre is a creative performance in which actors and audiences engage with each other to generate unforeseen outcomes – both on stage and in terms of the actions and behaviours which managers and employees take back to their own organisations.

Typically a short “trigger play” can be used to present audiences with dilemmas or conflicts – often of a type that they will recognise from their own working lives but in a context that is sufficiently different to prevent the drama from being too closely associated with actual people or events.

 Following the play each character can be “hotseated” to enable the audience to discover their motivations and to explore the intended consequences of their actions.

Employees, often with no previous history of being able to voice constructive comment at work, can draw on their day-to-day experiences to interrogate and criticise the actions of the fictional characters and organisation.

 In Forum Theatre critical scenes from the play can then be rerun, with the audience empowered to stop the action and to suggest changes to the behaviour of characters or the ways in which situations are resolved.

 From their engagement in this fictional setting it can be a short step to productive reflection about working practices in their own organisation and to the identification of concrete opportunities for improvement.   

PLAY VIDEO and experience Theatre and engaging audiences

For further information http://www.workplaceinnovation.eu/theatre-for-change

The history of Forum Theatre

Originating in the work of Augusto Boal (1931-2009), Forum Theatre developed as a political protest theatre in reaction to the societal injustices in Brazil. Using these ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ techniques when he moved to Europe, Boal demonstrated that the ‘old oppressors’ associated with the dictatorships could equally be applied to Western society, through discourses of social isolation and power, subconsciously impacting on individual freedom across all classes. Boal wanted to break down the barriers between the actors and the audience to encourage their participation in shaping the drama, enabling them to construct meaning and make sense of how we respond to one another.