Participation & Awareness

Directed at young people in the context of their daily lives, mostly at school, but also in community centres and in detention facilities. A group of professional actors and jokers, assisted by musicians, rappers and designers, produces and performs Forum Theatre pieces, in a very youth-orientated, multimedia style. Since 2000, we added a new ingredient to our Forums, namely the Moral Dilemma Discussion Method.

The current projects are:

Home & Away

A Forum play about discrimination, bullying and exclusion for 13-15 year-olds. A remake of the successful play by Cardboard Citizens, written by Adrian Jackson. The Dutch version was directed by Adrian Jackson and Luc Opdebeeck. It tells the story of the Ethiopian boy Asmellash who arrives at a new school without speaking Dutch. He is bullied by some of his classmates and is only supported by Clare. She is under threat of exclusion by her friends and constantly wavers between helping and abandoning Asmellash. In the end, the boy jumps off the roof of the school. Now who was responsible for that?

The story of Asmellash is cut in by another story of Cruel Man and Kind Man who make a journey away from Kind Man’s country where a war is raging. Cruel Man makes Kind Man jerk out his eyes but Kind Man is healed by magic plants, shown to him by the ghosts of the ancestors. Cruel Man wants to take economic advantage of this knowledge but overplays his hand.

How these stories relate is one of the mysteries the audience has to solve. Just as the mystery of Asmellash’s diary and why does he always want to keep his funny hat on?
Home & Away is more than just a Forum play. It comes with a lesson kit, information from anti-discrimination agencies and collects all ideas of the students. These ideas are presented to the school, the municipality and finally to the Ministry of Education.

First played: January 2007
Last played: June 2008
Total number of performances: 160

Classroom workshops

First project: October 2005
Status: permanent
Estimated number in 2008: 50

You don’t always need to do Forum. In fact, many groups of young people benefit more from longer processes. A series of 8 to 12 classroom workshops, in which a team of actors/jokers work with groups of 10-25 children, really allow the participants to dig in to a subject. Using Image and Forum Theatre techniques, as well as Blagg and Cop-in-the-Head, issues that directly affect the children can be tackled. The workshop format also allows us to work with children at Primary Schools, who find it dificult to confront antagonists played by adults in Forum Theatre performances.

Past and present projects:

• Aquarius Almere, school for children with conduct disorders: 8 workshops/2006-2007; 13 workshops/2007-2008
• Accent Rotterdam, school for basic vocational training for children with learning disabilities: 24 workshops/2008
• Da Vinci Leiden, language school for recently arrived minor immigrants/refugees: 13 workshops/2008