Ways of Making Forum Theatre
I am working on a new commission for a leading university to create three new Forum Theatre pieces around subjects of concern to the university. I thought it might be useful to document a little about the process of getting there. The model we have offered is to create these pieces with a small experienced team of Forum actors, preparing by doing interviews with key players at the university, and then following these with a few workshops.
At the moment we are still in a remote R & D stage. Almost every Forum Piece I have made in the past has come directly out of workshops with people affected by the issue under consideration. It already feels a considerable risk to diverge from this process, which is almost sacrosanct in TO terms. But needs must, and we simply to not have the time and space to develop the pieces purely out of workshops. So I have conducted a number of interviews with key players to try to find the stories that can form the basis of our pieces.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that stories need to resonate, and to resonate they need to be fully grounded in truth. That is not to say that they are reportage. But if they don’t ring true, they simply won't work. An interesting challenge in the modern world of data protection and confidentiality is that almost no-one is willing to risk sharing a story which is not their own. So far, so good, that’s normal and right. But you need to tell me who I can talk to to hear a story from the horse's mouth so to speak. And sometimes, even that is very difficult to achieve. So this is one of the challenges in this piece. From the interviews I have conducted (what did we do before Zoom?), I have started to get my head around the givens, the context, the world of a modern university. Though I went to a university some 40 years ago, it might as well be the 19th century, given how much they have changed. So this has been a steep learning curve.
One of the things we need to understand to create a forum is what forces are acting on people to make them do what they do. In a modern university, these include: finding money for research; being assessed from top and bottom, continuously (student ratings of individual tutors, national ratings of universities etc); dealing with many different cultures, as our universities are increasingly open to students from abroad; trying to negotiate differences without prejudice. And of course all the concerns of our time – Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, social inclusion, trans rights. The next challenge in devising a forum piece is how to make these forces (all of which involve oppression or can be perceived as involving oppression) – how to make these flesh, how to find characters and situations which can crystallise these issues so that an audience is reminded of them, to fully grasp the stakes before intervention.
