Empowerment & Dialogue

Primarily aimed at giving marginalized people an opportunity to be seen and heard in society, to stimulate social inclusion and to provide a medium to challenge the 'general public'

Secondly aimed at converting monologue into dialogue, both between people and the state, as well as between people and other people and between people and institutions. In this programme we use all the techniques, predominantly Theatre of the Oppressed, available to us. Some projects involve professional actors, in others we work only with non-actors.

The current projects are:

The Studio

We work with several groups of homeless people and people with a psychiatric background. These projects are aimed at empowerment and participation but also at pointing out how exclusion and oppression of these groups work. Some of the groups already perform, others will do so in due time.

Some of the participants are trained as Participatory Drama practitioner. Eventually, all Studio projects will be, at least partially, led by people with street knowledge.

The most successful project so far produced a DVD in 2007. It’s available in Dutch.


Community projects

Ranging from: a dialogue between the young and the old; between people with migrant backgrounds and people without; sensitizing a community towards certain taboo themes; to raising the issues of social inclusion, discrimination and community building.

From 2008, most of these community projects will be done in Rotterdam, in the vicinity of our Centre.

Prison projects

Between 2002 and 2007, a number of projects was carried out in prisons based on the Blagg!-method. We also started offering one-off workshops to groups of prisoners, focusing on “what do you need to make sure you don’t return here”.