Our performance development model is primarily workshop-based. These multi-day development workshops create interactions between persons with different types of expertise on the complex relationships between science, technology, and society and theatre artists to generate questions, themes, and content for performances. Workshop participants can include scientists, engineers, Informal Science Education and Science & Technology Studies professionals, and other members of the public such as science teachers, community activists, consumers and parents.
These dialogue and movement-based creative encounters are a special feature of the TWISTS project and seek to ensure:
- the accuracy of our performances;
- the relevance of our performances to multiple audiences; and,
- the visibility in our performances of multiple, competing and sometimes contradictory perspectives on the complex relationships between science, technology and society so that no one expert group is able to impose its expertise on the others as a unilaterally privileged source of meaning-making, attitude formation or decision-making.
We seek to promote informed dialogue, debate, and decision-making related to science and technology, and do this by providing resources for our multiple audiences to better understand and express their own perspectives on socio-scientific issues, as well as the perspectives of others.
Our artist teams have developed performance development workshop practices that include Image and Forum Theatre, Story Circle Methodology, gestural text and movement, and improvisation. Our vision of the role of performance in stimulating and facilitating public dialogue draws heavily from frameworks and techniques developed in relation to devised and collaborative theatre (Bicat & Baldwin, 2002; Oddey, 1996; Miller, 1994) and “theatre of the oppressed” (Boal 1979/1982, 1992; Schutzman & Cohen-Cruz 1994, 2006). We are particularly informed by theories and practices in community-based theatre (Leonard & Kilkelly, 2006; Rohd, 1998), which, as a field, articulates a set of values and methodologies built around respect for the local and place-based knowledge of communities and the inclusion of community members in arts practices.