Transfer & Development

Aimed at professionals in the field of education, drama, social work, sports, health care, sustainable development and foreign aid, as well as at activists and community groups. The primal goal is to transfer Theatre of the Oppressed and related techniques to a wider constituency, thus expanding the use of the method and - to be honest - alleviating the current responsibility of Formaat for the development of TO in the Netherlands.

Trainings and International Masterclasses
In the Netherlands we give basic and advanced trainings to Participatory Drama practitioners and to people from other fields of work who want to use Participatory Drama. Our final goal is to introduce Participatory Drama as a steady element of Drama Schools and other forms of higher education.

During each year, a number of international masterclasses is given by our estimated colleagues. Watch the homepage for regular announcements!

Joker course
Because there is no way to learn to use Participatory Drama at any institute of higher education, we started our own Joker course back in 2001. Theory, practice, supervision and sharing of experiences are offered to allow the participants to develop their skills in all directions.

Library and Archives
Formaat has gathered a large amount of material about Theatre of the Oppressed in the Formaat has gathered a large amount of material about Theatre of the Oppressed in the Netherlands. This material will be made accessible to others for the sake of research, project development and inspiration.

Research facilities
As the library is developing, the Workplace will be available for research projects, both in terms of reference as well as in terms of developing scientifically based research formats for participatory drama. Three scientific studies were conducted on the work of Formaat itself between 2001 and 2006.

Publications
We publish reports and evaluations in Dutch and English. See under Publications. In 2006, we published our first book “De Mens in de Hoofdrol”, a Dutch Participatory Drama manual. Formaat also publishes in magazines and reviews.

Laboratory
As you can read more extensively in the Theatre of the Oppressed section, TO activity is still relatively low in the Netherlands, compared to many other European countries. We intend to change that and gradually build a network of TO practitioners who exchange and experiment ideas and techniques in a laboratory situation.

Lectures
Finally, the Workplace for Participatory Drama has a lot of interesting experiences to share. In our view, those stories are of the same expert value as those of other speakers at conferences, symposia, at schools and universities and whatever other meeting.