Leadership Training - Forum Theatre
Forum Theatre – What is it?
Forum Theatre is a type of theatre created by the innovative and influential practitioner Augusto Boal as part of what he calls his "Theatre of the Oppressed." While practicing earlier in his career, Boal would apply 'simultaneous dramaturgy'. In this process the actors or audience members could stop a performance, often a short scene in which a character was being oppressed in some way.
The audience would suggest different actions for the actors to carry out on-stage in an attempt to change the outcome of what they were seeing. This was an attempt to undo the traditional actor partition and bring audience members into the performance, to have an input into the dramatic action they were watching.
This method of forum theatre is used more specifically during our training courses to aid the development, awareness, understanding and treatment of staff as human beings during difficult personal and business situations.
Each member of your team will play a new manager in post at a generic position within an imaginary Company where they will be approached by a member of their staff who wishes to speak to them about a private matter they do not know the member of staff’s issues, they simply know their name and the fact they have been with the Company a short amount of time but have proved a very useful, influential and effective member of the team.
During the next two hours the team work through a number of complex and challenging problems involving numerous members of staff whom they will have to address and interact with. Throughout this experience they are guided by our Coach and are able to use many tools and techniques to overcome the difficulties facing them. They are able to pause the action at any time so they can confer as a team, rewind scenarios to try again to resolve them as well as ‘hot seat’ the actors to find out how they are feeling.
