What Exactly Happens In Forum Theatre?

Forum Theatre, the way Tiatr-O! delivers to its corporate clientele is derived from Augusto Boal's version, also originally referred to as 'Theatre Of The Oppressed'. It's a powerful way of engaging learners in an experience that is personal, insightful and enables immediate application of skills.

A typical Forum theatre process involves pre-scripted work related scenes presented by professional actors in the form of mini plays. These plays are written in such a manner that characters demonstrate behaviours that defy the requirements of the topic at hand, meaning that they demonstrate behaviours that are ineffective and produce an undesired outcome. In effect, there are multiple opportunities in each play for characters to produce a positive outcome but the script does not enable such outcomes.

Participants watch the plays and they then get opportunities to change course of the plays they observe by being a part of the play and intervening at appropriate points, thus turning from mere spectators to 'spectactors' as defined by Augusto Boal. This provides an opportunity for participants to learn by participating in this experiential methodology than merely watching a video or a PowerPoint presentation. Not just that, a facilitator steers the whole process enabling participants not only receive feedback but also take home powerful insights through well crafted debriefs between each intervention.

Each play runs for anywhere between 4 to 6 minutes and a typical forum theatre based workshop runs for about 4 hours. At Tiatr-O!, we conduct forum theatre based workshops on a variety of topics that include Unconscious Bias, Sexual Harassment at the workplace, Gender Issues, Leadership Skills, Emotional intelligence, Sales and selling skills and more.

To know more, contact us at hello@tiatr-o.com