Spark theatre amplifies community voices, nurtures understanding and helps communities become aware of existing capacities for transforming complex social issues.
APPROACH
Using games, image theatre, forum theatre and other methods drawing from Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, Spark Theatre offers a space for communities to tell their own collective stories, explore community challenges and discover new insights towards positive change. Each project is designed collaboratively based on group needs, preferred schedule and topic of interest. Whether you choose to organize customized workshops, or a Forum play with your school, workplace or community organization, each session focuses on the topic/issue of your choice while also allowing participants to nurture important skills like:
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Trust-Building
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Creative Problem Solving
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Empathic listening
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Collaboration
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Flexibility
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Authentic Communication
ABOUT FORUM THEATRE
Forum Theatre is a UNESCO-recognized educational tool for community dialogue that involves the audience in suggesting real-time solutions to challenges that come up in a presentation of short scenes. The story representing a relevant complex community challenge is created, rehearsed and performed by people who have lived experience.
The play is designed to catalyze the audience to offer real-time strategies to transform the challenges that emerge in the play. In a Forum production, a story with no resolution to the challenges presented is performed. The story is then presented again—only this second time, audience members can intervene in the story, as “spect-actors,” in an attempt to resolve the challenges. A trained facilitator (with experience in ‘Joking’ for Forum Theatre) prepares and encourages audience members to replace characters, suggest changes and act out alternatives that allow the story to unfold in a different way. This process becomes a “Rehearsal for Reality”, a way for audience members to overcome complacency and become activated to use their existing capacities (knowledge, attitudes, understanding) to make meaningful change.
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People
Madeleine Whalen, MA
Founder, Lead Facilitator/Joker
Madeleine is a community-based theatre maker with mixed Acadian and Lebanese settler descent based in Wolastoq (Fredericton, NB). She has a background in Peace and conflict transformation studies. Her approach balances both structure and flexibility, and embraces the curiosity and active listening inherent to improvisational theatre. She is an experienced facilitator with a background working with newcomer, immigrant and refugee families in Canada.
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