Target reached!
The extra money will enable us to work with a technician and further explore the pos...
Drama for Democracy
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Aim
Drama for Democracy is a Legislative Theatre project. It is about using theatre plays and spaces to enable people to become policymakers!
History
8 years ago, Active Inquiry started working with people at Bethany Christian Trust, Shakti Women's Aid and the Alma project. We created plays with them about their life experiences including addiction, homelessness, domestic violence and mental health difficulties. This soon became the Spect-Act Network, a network of three community theatre companies creating work of importance to them.
Forum Theatre
The network often uses a type of theatre called Forum Theatre. Originally developed in South America, Forum Theatre enables an audience to stop a play, replace one of the characters and try things differently on stage! The idea is to encourage dialogue around a particular social problem and to see if we can collectively find ways forward. One example if this is our Home project which looked at the issue of housing and toured theatre spaces in scotland in 2019.
Drama for Democracy
We were excited to perform our pieces of Forum Theatre to people in power, including the first Minister of Scotland. However, we began to become disillusioned about whether this was leading to any real change. We began looking into a type of theatre called Legislative Theatre, which was first developed in brazil in the 1990s. It uses a participatory theatre performance to enable an audience to propose, debate and vote on new laws or policy! We were hooked and Drama for Democracy was born!
We have spent two years on research and development, as well as taking small pieces of theatre around the country to gather views and build new relationships. In 2024 we will be starting the BIG project - creating and touring a piece of Legislative theatre around Scotland.
Our ask
Unfortunately we didn't get any funding to be able to continue developing the project until the end of 2023. Momentum is such an important part of a community project and coming to work with us on a weekly basis is really important for our actors as well as for the development of the project. We want to continue meeting and to run a small pilot project so we can test out ideas before the big project next year. We need to raise at least £1000 for this to happen. Please help if you can. Thank you
This project successfully funded on 23rd October 2023