Active Inquiry

Thank you to Dave, Pinar, Karen, Liz, Nick, Suzanne and Emily for the blog post below about Active Inquiry’s trip to Lisbon!

The Active Inquiry company has had an amazing weekend in Lisbon meeting some of the international Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) community. We’ve learnt some new games that we look forward to sharing when we get back to Scotland and seen some inspiring examples of how TO has been used around the world to transform lives.

Over the last six months we have been focusing on incorporating more image, sound and rhythm into our devising and it was great to  mix with other international companies who are exploring this too. Our play “Divided We Fall?” was performed on the same night as “Images of Women“, a play by a group of women called the Madalena’s from Berlin. Both plays used image, sound and rhythm to cut across language barriers and create powerful metaphors that expose invisible oppressions in a clear way that also show the complexities. We were delighted that the humour in our play also travelled successfully to this international audience and provoked some really interesting interventions particularly engaging with our most recent rhythm developments.

Seeing the play performed by the Madalena’s has inspired us to explore how we might be able to use soundscapes even further with our future work. Their play was an extremely powerful exploration of universal oppressions of women and provoked some interesting discussions on the responsibility of men and women to continue to fight these. It was a beautiful and provocative performance and some of the images are going to stay with us for a long time.

We also learnt a lot about Legislative Theatre which is an area of TO that none of us had much experience of before. It was great to see an example of an aspect of TO that can directly influence changes to the law and have a real concrete impact towards making a more just society. It was really interesting to learn about the social issues that are current in Lisbon. We had some insights into a forum play created by GTO Lisbon, a local theatre company working with a group in the Cova de Moura area of Lisbon. This addressed issues around nationality, identity, citizenship and racism.

What an amazing experience it was with a lovely bunch of people. We were very well fed and warmly welcomed to Lisbon and this global TO community.  We look forward to welcoming these companies to our Forum Theatre Festival in May!

Posted on: March 27, 2013

Filed under: News

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