Active Inquiry

What does the Active Inquiry Company Do?

1st February, 2016 - Posted by Gavin - Comments Off on What does the Active Inquiry Company Do?

This week, Company Member Dave Poyner reflects on our recent 4 days together as a Company:

The Active Inquiry company members have been together this past weekend, doing development work. This was an opportunity for team members to talk about the different community groups we’ve been working with, and to do some training together, We’ve also had the opportunity for some reflection on what motivates our commitment to Active Inquiry, and what the work is for. This has been very enlightening. It turns out, funnily enough, that we aren’t all the same. We don’t have identical political beliefs, we don’t share the same backgrounds, and we don’t have the same view of our place in the world.

What we do share is a desire to effect transformation in the world, and to do it through the use of theatre – in particular, Forum Theatre. We take that theatre to our local communities in the places where they live and work, but we intend to make it available to the wider population in mainstream venues. We will not achieve that by taking our audience for granted. We will identify oppression, and create great theatre around it that we can be proud of, that will people will want to see and will be inspired by, and  that will lead to genuine transformation in the world.

This opens up a number of questions, some of which we looked at on the final day of this period of working together. Who is our target audience? How do we reach them? How do we reach the people who have never heard of Forum Theatre?

We are starting to put in place a structure that allows company members to share the load in answering these questions and to start making things happen. We would be interested to hear from anyone reading this what thoughts they might wish to share on this subject.