Theatre-of-time, a rehearsal: becoming futural

How to bridge the possible to the impossible — performative prototyping for a world becoming.

“Without a model, you are nowhere” Bodys Isek Kingelez (1948–2015) Y no podemos construir lo nuestro con lo mismo, lo posible ya se hizo; ahora vamos por lo imposible.

Be realistic, demand the impossible!

Because like Bob Dylan said “The times they are a changin”

The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2050 Earth will be home to 9.8 billion people. This represents a 31% increase of human beings globally in just 33 years.[1], Science and technology have made paradigm shifts the new norm, and these shifts are shining a spotlight on the “big ‘C’” sociopolitical words of our time, like conflict, complexity, capitalism, crisis and colonialism. We designers need to prioritise engagement with politicised issues surrounding these ‘C’ words, and we must reimagine alternatives to our collective ways of “being-in-the-world” and “being-with-things.”[2]

In June this year, I had the pleasure of meeting Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Network at the Transition Design Symposium in Devon. By serendipitous coincidence he’s into the imagination as well, and something he said around the dinner table that stuck with me was (something to the effect of), “we’ve forgotten how to imagine”, and increasingly we’re “outsourcing our imagination” to others. This is a sentiment that I explore in my design practices and something that endeavours to radicalise strategic design, which is perpetually being echoed in the thoughts and feelings (alt: reflections) of many other design and non-design practitioners and academics. Paolo Lugari from Centro las Gaviotas expresses in ‘Un Nuevo Renacimiento en el Trópico’ (A new revival in the tropics), “we are not confronting an energy crisis but one of imagination and enthusiasm”. Extending this sentiment, Arturo Escobar states in ‘Design For The Pluriverse’ that the imagination is “a muscle that needs to be exercised”.

The fundamental question for me is; how might we exercise the social imagination of a given community to imagine different futures? Furthermore, how might a renewed investment in the construction of imaginaries help designer-kin, communities consisting of the empowered and the powerless, the infrastructures of governments, organisations and civil society, to reimagine another way of being beyond the too familiar imagined ways being born out of western narratives to-date (cultural and capital), cyberpunk and Hollywood films typically dominated by the patriarchy?

It is time we designers recognise the limitations of our known narratives and the fact that there is no single world or worldview humans prescribe to — so in crafting new worlds, we designers with kin must aspire to expand our capacity to explore the dynamics within and between plural worlds and worldviews. We must reconceptualise alternative and preferably more sustainable ways of being in the world where multiple worlds fit, or “un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos”, a key principle within the Zappatista movement — if we’re to transcend the possible to the impossible.

Collective imagination matters, but perhaps, it’s who does the imagining that matters more.

Theatre-of-Time (TT) is my proposal for a design praxis that invites diverse actors within a given community, with shared or opposing geographies, values, experiences and expectations to become futural and reflective by enacting, embodying and representing theatrical fictions that help them tackle design challenges and reimage ways of being and being-with through performative co-design and reflection-in-action — building on what Donna J. Haraway refers to as speculative fabulation, feminism and fiction.[3] At its core, TT is interested in helping individuals harness social imaginaries to tackle design challenges that unearth concrete actions and long-term visions for transitions towards a set of near and future scenarios.

“Only that which seems impossible is remotely adequate to the extremity of the condition of the world. Be realistic demand the impossible.”

So what is Theatre-of-time?

In a nutshell, TT aims to help actors (co-designing performers) jump out of their box by encouraging them to use their lived experience and imagination to explore how the world is in relation to how the world could be, through performative prototyping, active dialogue and playing with time, matter and meaning. It is a speculative co-design research praxis that uses different theatre techniques, including improvisation games, image and forum theatre, [4] to facilitate the reimagination and reflection of our complex entangled past, present and future scenarios and states of being-in-the-world and being-with-things. Actors have the power to create and change performances making the scenario building process active, reflective and dynamic. Like acts of utoping as expressed by Bammer in ‘Utopia as a Method’, TT has the ability to simultaneously ‘project itself forward, and from an imaginary place in time and look back on its own origins’,[5] offering a critical perspective on the present from the standpoint of an imaginary future.

“We must not be limited by our present knowledge, beyond understanding we as a people must seek to emote impossible futures.” Centro las Gaviotas Paolo Lugari

In essence, it is a transdisciplinary tool that merges applied social sciences with strategic and speculative design methods to help communities become futural and reflective in acts of worlding. TT builds on and converges experimental practices in theatre and design, borrowing from Augusto Boal’s Theatre Of The Oppressed and David Diamonds Theatre For Living and contextualises them within a strategic and speculative design practice. It is ontological without explicitly calling itself ontological design. It situates itself within the emerging practice of Ethnographic Experiential Futures, “a design-driven, hybrid approach to foresight aimed at increasing the accessibility, variety and depth of available images of the future”[6] and aligns with Speculative Enactment, as a participatory design research practice that invites textural and systematic analysis of participants, active amidst speculative but consequential circumstances.[7]

TT invites ethnographic inquiry into actors responses and reactions within any given contextual and situational performance of a speculative past, present or future scenario, through which critical reflection, discussion about, and action towards visions for transition can be initiated.

How you might experience Theatre-of-time

The experience of becoming futural by enacting and embodying present and future states of being within the TT is key to the success of the praxis. For this reason, we look directly to Stanislavski’s systematic approach to training actors, which cultivates what he calls the “art of experiencing”, used to mobilise an actor’s conscious thought and will to activate, less-controllable psychological processes of others — such as emotional experience and subconscious behaviour — sympathetically and indirectly.”

In becoming futural and rehearsing for the future, actors search for intrinsic motivations and behaviours that need not be rational to justify actions as well as preferred prospects that have been explored within a performance which could be a scene or image. Stanislavski refers to this form of learning through action as a ‘physically grounded rehearsal process’ known as the “Method of Physical Action”.

With actors, TT takes critical components of past, present and future scenarios, puts them in action and creates opportunities for active interventions in the scenario. Thus, TT is a rehearsal for the future that allows designers and kin to reflect on and craft transitions towards desired scenarios with greater care and criticality. Think of it as a real-time choose your own adventure where actors are invited to ‘intervene’ and change the narrative of the performance and in doing so change the vision of a ‘preferred’ future or state of being-in-the-world or being-with-things. This active, dynamic and participatory approach to character and scenario building is more than role play and persona making and can be more effective than or complementary to your more well known strategic and speculative design practices popularised through IDEO’s Tim Brown’s ‘Design Thinking’ and Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s ‘Speculative Everything’.[8]

Key elements of the experience

The Joker (A facilitator with more scope)

The Joker is a playful agitator licensed to speak the truth, what the community doesn’t want to hear the joker has the permission to say. Their role is not to give instructions, but to create an environment and conditions in which meaningful change and the emergence of novelty is likely to occur.[9]

Performance as dialogue (co-design interplay)

Performance as dialogue proposes a shift in how participants co-design, communicate and problem solve encouraging interplay (collective and individual) between the brain, body, environment and things. In this context, the intelligence participants bring to a design challenge — “arises from the interactions of an agent with its physical and social environment”. Through active dialogue and making participants co-create sets, props, characters and plays, simulating imagined scenes that provide insight into present and situated design challenges, exposing points of intervention and opportunity to shift that present towards a future context.

The forum (playable context, environment and things)

TT can be thought of as a forum or assembly. A space for relational complexities, contradictions and tensions between past, present and future scenarios explored contextually, and for a specific design challenge.[10] It t takes on the role of a ‘contact zone’, a concept and term coined by Mary Louise Pratt to define ‘social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other’.

Goals

  1. Use theatre as a political intervention to develop hope-led and action-oriented strategies that challenge politicised issues.
  2. Illuminate possible transition pathways from a situated present to multiple imagined futures — through which we extend the boundary of the possible.
  3. Connect short-term initiatives to longer-term visions, with a view that a networked assemblage of connected and sequenced initiatives, involving multiple actors who can affect systemic transition. For example, cultural, social, organisational or political.

Expectations

TT is intentionally ambiguous. Change is hard, and as such if participating actors and observers manage to take one impossible step or action towards a vision for transition, in my view, the performative acts have been a success. TT events can be a one-time thing or a series of connected events that happen across a period of time. This way it can integrate with other design activities that sit within a broader design program.

Currently, there are three TT events and experience based formats. Off the back of each event, design fictions are created that reflect the insight, actions, visions for transitions and near and future scenarios unearthed during the events.

  • 0 to 1 day (scenarios / things)
  • 2 to 4 days (scenarios + things + image theatre)
  • 5 to 8 days (scenarios + things + image theatre + forum theatre)

Theatre-of-time is essentially an invitation to dance with systems; here’s why.

The question of being otherwise or being with is complex, and if we are to bridge the possible to the impossible ways of being we first need to explore the complexities of being in a world becoming. Systems thinking and design for systems change (although very much in vogue) is not new and can mean different things to different people. TT, as it stands, is mostly concerning second-order cybernetics, what Von Foerster referred to as the cybernetics of “observing systems”, in the case of TT, participating actors are the observing systems, observing themselves and others in action. It also pays homage to Sympoietic (collectively-producing) systems, which Donna Haraway refers to as being ‘complex, dynamic, responsive and situated systems tied to ‘worlding with, in company’.[10] By this I mean — organisational culture, policy environments, market mechanisms, legislation, finance models and incentives, governance structures, traditions, habits, culture, identity, habitats. Through participatory performance and active dialogue TT simulates multi-actor (human, nature, machine) situated and relational systems. In a sense, this is a direct extension of David Diamonds ‘Theatre For Living’ which views the world through a systems theory lens.[11]

TT also recognises systems can’t be directed, they can, however, be tampered with, disturbed and danced with, and to that effect may help actors stimulate micro shifts within systems that may lead to macro transitions or transformed systems. The collective performance of actors within the TT triggers a process of emergence, of a new order and way of being within a given system. In this performative and active analysis of systems, TT makes tangible the value flows between actors (human, natural, technological), recognising the performative role of things, both natural and technological in social systems. Moreover, on a deeper systems level, TT illuminates the interplay and affects between what Dan Hill called the dark (invisible) physical (observable) matter, which is key to unlocking strategic interventions that stimulate systems transition and transformation. Design does not always have the answer — strategic hope coupled with making small plays, dancing with the dark and observable matter within a system, as a bird within a single flock does, might just result in, previously, unimaginable possibility.

What we need to recognise now more than ever, at a systems level design needs to give people hope — strategic hope.

“Doesn’t everyone who has tried to put dreams into words know that the best is dissolved and destroyed when they are cast into a language?”

Think of TT as a formula where the use of performative prototyping workshops involving the development of scenarios, sets, props, characters and plays activates the social imaginary that guides strategic hope. Futuring is not a science, it is an act of what Ernst Bloch called “anticipatory illumination”, suggesting that scientific knowledge of the future is not possible, so our orientation to the future must be informed by the imagination of the social-whole.[13] As an act of strategic hope for a world becoming, TT leverages actors embodied knowledge, imagination and hope with mythology and speculative fictions to construct visions of other ways of being and being with, by which transition pathways to those visions of being otherwise can be illuminated.

There is a popular saying that says ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ but when dealing with plural fragmented and contentious situations and wicked problems I would go as far to say hope trumps both culture and strategy. In the context of design, we must expand our limits of hope for what can be possibly imagined The use of theatre as a design praxis creates opportunities to explore possibilities beyond rational understanding of the social-whole at a systems level and introduces strategic hope into ‘C’ letter word design challenges concerning democracy, nation states, regional authorities and many systems of living, which Dan Hill would suggest are all “debatable, contestable positions” and therefore be considered as design challenges.[14]

TT as a rehearsal for the future, has the power to render visible and tangible imagined situations, unrealities and impossibilities for, “a different world, in which we would become (slightly) different people, with (slightly) revised understandings of our interests and ideals.” Through the use of participatory performance, speculation and fiction, TT has the ability to surface the collective hopes, fears and aspirations of a given community, unearthing deeper and more robust visions — while being firmly planted in and cognisant of the contexts and cultures where those imaginaries are found. TT is not about rational decision making, (generally speaking, we know what is possible through rational thinking) it is about creating the conditions conducive for irrational emotional, non-verbal, unstructured decision-making and expression — this in my view is strategic hope, a key ingredient to bridging the possible to the impossible.

These are imaginary times, let’s do imaginary things.

If you, your community or organisation is struggling to get what you want out of collaboration or other ‘design thinking’ methods, or you have a complex wicked problem or a design challenge you’re trying to crack or you’d like to know more about TT, I would love to hear from you.

I’ll be sharing some recent projects using Theatre as a design tool here soon, so watch this space. In the meantime, a recent interview I gave with Rob Hopkins, complementary to this post, has some good insight into the lived experience of theatre as a tool for political and community action.

Here is a link to the interview https://www.robhopkins.net/2018/09/04/grace-turtle-everywhere-i-look-there-is-this-mass-realisation-that-we-need-to-re-engage-our-imagination/

Footnotes

[1] Jones, B. (2017). The Earth’s population is going to reach 9.8 billion by 2050, World Economic Forum.

[2] Willis, A. (2006). Ontological Designing, Design Philosophy Papers, 4:2, pp. 69–92.

[3] Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

[4] Referring to theatre games originally developed by Augusto Boal

[5] Levitas, R. (2013). Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 144.

[6] Lockton, D. Candy, S. (2018). A Vocabulary for Visions in Designing for Transitions. Design Research Society 2018 Paper.

[7] Elsden C, Chatting D, Durrant AC, Garbett A, Nissen B, Vines J, Kirk DS. On Speculative Enactments. In: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2017, Denver, Colorado, USA: ACM.

[8] Dunne, A. Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge: MIT Press.

[9] Diamonds, D. (2007). Theatre For Living: The Art and Science of Community-Based Dialogue. Trafford Publishing.

[10] See 3

[11] See 9

[12] Levitas, R. (2013). Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

[13] Hill, D. (2014). Dark Matter and Trojan Horses : A Strategic Design Vocabulary. United Kingdom. Strelka Press.

[14] Levitas, R. (2013). Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.154.

Acknowledgements

I wanted to give a special thanks to all the inspiring humans who gave me hope to play in the darkness and to Tony Fry, Tom Scholte and the Design and Special Projects team at Universidad de Ibagué who gave me the missing ingredients to lay the foundations for Theatre-of-time — an ongoing experiment in using theatre as design.

All photos in this post are from a workshop held in July 2018 at the Universidad de Ibagué given by Tom Scholte.

Grace Turtle Polifroni

Written by

Post-disciplinary designer exploring futures, transitions and critical becoming’s produced through collaborative fiction, performance and play.

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