 Hi, my name's Gayna, I'm a drama practitioner and I specialise in Theatre of the Oppressed. This is a fascinating methodology that's used all over the world in different sectors and it has many applications including policy transformation, research, co-design of services and inspiring community-led action. So I would like to share with you in this presentation some of the ways that I've used Theatre of the Oppressed with different groups and invite you to get in touch if you have a project that you think would benefit from this fun and participatory practice. I'm also really keen to hear from people who are using this approach in their work. So what is it? Well essentially it's using drama games and activities to engage the community in expressing what they want to change from their perspective and this results in creating and devising a play together. So the community develops a play which shows the problem and it's using their own lived experience. In the play the main character will always end up in a crisis. This play is performed to the same community so people who are connected to the theme in some way. After they've seen the play we have an open discussion about what has gone on. Is it something they can relate to? Does it seem real? And is there anything that can be done by the characters which would avert the crisis from happening and change the outcome? Then the play is performed again and the audience are invited on stage to enact their ideas of ways to change the outcome of the play. After each intervention the audience discuss the strategy. Is this something that could work in real life? What needs to happen? How could it improve the situation? And gradually more strategies are co-produced. After all the discussion the community has a list of strategies, things they want to change, policies, how they're going to do it and the community takes action and it's all developed by the people themselves. So this approach is brilliant because it subverts the hierarchy. It's not people going into a community and saying what they need. It's the community saying what they need so it's working from the ground up. Often we're making a problem that was previously invisible visible but we're using a fictional example. Our discussions enable lived experience to be shared and research can be gathered to inform policy transformation. People rehearse the actions that they want to take in real life and this builds confidence for them to actually enact that. Policy makers learn from community's perspective and local knowledge is prioritised. And finally the whole process leads to locally led action. When using this method with a group of LGBTQIA young people the topic of homophobia arose but it wasn't quite in the way that I expected. It was felt that homophobia may be coming from their peers but it wasn't being challenged adequately by the teachers and in some cases it was being colluded with. So we created a play that fictionalised this problem and we took it to a diversity conference where there were local schools assembled teachers and pupils together and they watched the play. This facilitated a very rich dialogue about what could be done in their schools to change the situation. Many strategies were enacted and the young people were able to show themselves how they would like teachers to respond to these incidents in an ideal world so the teachers were learning from the students. There was also a scene where teachers were engaging in the staff room about how they could address their own professional practice. What would they do if they witnessed a colleague being homophobic? I worked with a group of women in the rural community of Killongo, Burkina Faso. They wanted to address the problem of girls dropping out of education. During a series of exploratory workshops the group devised scenes which revealed reasons for this. One major reason which was revealed was the consistent use of corporal punishment in schools despite an anti-violent policy. This work enabled discussions to take place on a sensitive topic as we explored the effects of education policy on an individual. The project was brief but had it continued I would have sought to engage community organisations and policymakers with the work. As part of a participatory research project on the topic of loneliness within the older community in Tower Hamlets I spent six weeks in a collaborative devising process with a cross-cultural group. While research had explored many of the practical barriers which contribute to loneliness such as physical health limitations and lack of accessible transport the drama project served as an exploration of emotional causes and impacts of isolation. A topic that is hard to address came to life in a fictional story with which everyone could identify. Please get in touch if you use theatre for research policy transformation and you would like to share learning I'm always keen to make connections with people in the field. I'd also be keen to work with you if you have a collaborative learning project that you think would benefit from this fun and inclusive approach. So here is my email rehearsetherevolutionatgmail.com please do drop me a line and let's see what we can do together.