Boldly trauma-conscious and survivor-led theatre and participation arts for social change.
WHAT IS RESPONSE ABILITY?
We believe that theatre can change lives, change communities, change societies, through a process we think of as Response Ability Theatre.
It works like so:
A theatre show can evoke a response in its audience that creates greater understanding of a certain group of people. This then gives audience members the ability to engage with that group of people on a non-hierarchical, non-judgemental level, which makes that group of people more able to express themselves and their needs to the world around them. There are many ways in which that will manifest - one of them, of course, being to make more theatre, evoke more responses, empower more ability, inspire more theatre.
Response.
There are so many things we're not allowed to say, see, think, feel, in our everyday lives. So many problems in society we just don't have the language to tackle - and the only way to avoid criticism is just not to try. So we feign tolerance without really knowing what it means for us - and that is so dangerous.
We want our auditoria to be oases where you can respond to what's around you without judgment - where you can come genuinely to understand others better by understanding yourself better.
Ability.
So much of the language we do have to address our differences is so unhelpful - primarily because it relies on opposites and binaries that inherently lead us to "good" and "bad", "weak" and "strong". It's necessarily uncollaborative.
We tell stories that expose the making of these narratives, celebrate the unique talents possessed by those who typically go unvalued, and shines a light in the direction of a society in which everyone has the chance to express themselves, apply themselves, and the desire to see everyone else do the same.
Theatre.
Theatre doesn't start in auditoria and it shouldn't finish there either. For us, it starts with the need to communicate with mutual honesty and generosity, it houses our need to grieve and forgive the trauma we have all individually both experienced and inflicted, and we want you to take it with you out of those spaces with vitality, humour, permission and active hope.
Responsibility is a chore. But Response Ability is a gift. And theatre is found wherever it thrives.
A note on how and
for whom we work
We look to affect change for all survivors, recognising that post-traumatic stress affects people of all, and multiply intersecting, characteristics. We have identified cultural norms that perpetuate systemic enabling of trauma, and our leadership actively challenges these.
In particular, we strive to resist patriarchal norms - being aware of how ingrained they are in the social roles that people of all genders are routinely forced to play, whether they then encounter trauma as victims, perpetrators, or both. Currently, what this looks like for us is that we are female-led, with a strong LGBTQ+ presence in our staff team.
Members of the Faith and Violence Against Women and Girls Coalition, we endeavour to work with faith and race literacy.
With our connections to the arts and homelessness movement, we are highly conscious of the intersections between post-traumatic stress and experience of homelessness in any of its myriad forms - and see activism against homelessness as vital in the movement for prevention of post-traumatic stress and empowerment of survivors.
VISION, MISSION, VALUES
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Our vision is
a world in which trauma survivors are
the authorities on our own pasts,
the agents of our own futures,
and artists for our collective present.
In other words: we are working towards the end of survivors being questioned on their experiences. The end of survivors told the limits of what they are capable of in their lives to come. The end of being spoken for in the survivor stories that get told on our stages. The normalisation of listening genuinely, asking the right questions, encouraging ambition, and handing over the microphone.
Our mission is
to equip and platform survivors to lead
on how stories like ours are told and learned from.
In other words: we want to give survivors the specialised support that many need, and that traditional arts training and creation spaces don't provide, to find their artistic voices with greater joy than suffering - so they can sustain their artistic and activist presence to the point where various sections of society actively want to work with us on the issues that matter to us, rather than seeing survivor engagement as a tokenistic virtue signal.
Our values are
Integrity,
Compassion,
Respect,
Affirmation,
Courage.
We commit to practising what we preach, and owning up to it when we fall short of that. We meet people where they are, actively avoid making assumptions, and believe that all are approaching us from a good place until we have reason to believe otherwise. We assume that survivors can do things rather than assuming they can't, and are enthusiastically open to the different versions of achievement that will come out of that. We do not shy away from the work that needs to be done, even if it is the hardest work to get off the ground.
THEORY OF CHANGE
