The bridge of methods
Two traditions, each good at what the other cannot reach. Brazilian theatre puts bodies into the problem; Dutch design names what the bodies revealed.
The engine of the method
In every workshop a technique of Augusto Boal meets a Dutch design method at a point of encounter. Theatre does not illustrate the method: it is the engine that drives it.
The methods, workshop by workshop
Each workshop joins a Boal technique to a Dutch method. Click one to read what it is, where it comes from and how Ponte em Cena uses it. Six are settled; the seventh, the Dutch layer of the third workshop, is not, and is marked as such. The Brazilian side is described at length in the document on Theatre of the Oppressed (in Portuguese).
01 Diagnose reading the other
02 Generate staging the deadlock
03 Decide propose
Newspaper Theatre
Augusto Boal, Núcleo 1 of Teatro de Arena, São Paulo, 1970–71. Text in this section: (in)PULSO — Comunicação Viva.
Newspaper Theatre turns news reports, features, speeches, statistics, documents and other informational material into theatrical action.
The technique was developed to prompt a critical reading of the press and of public narratives. A news report is understood not only by what it says, but by what it leaves out, by the vocabulary it uses, by the voices it presents and by the way it arranges events.
Newspaper Theatre helps the group ask:
- Who appears in this narrative?
- Who was not heard?
- Which interests are present?
- Which facts were given prominence?
- What other readings would be possible?
Workshop 01. A Dutch and a Brazilian newspaper on the same subject, read in parallel, with a physical response before any word.
Forum Theatre
Augusto Boal. The most widely used technique of Theatre of the Oppressed. Text in this section adapted from the sections on the spect-actor and on theatre as rehearsal, (in)PULSO — Comunicação Viva.
In conventional theatre the spectator stays outside the action. Here that separation is put in question: the participant can watch, but can also act. Step into the scene, replace characters, change behaviours, propose alternatives.
The scene is not a space apart from life. It works as a rehearsal of possibilities.
Change does not happen because someone presents a ready-made answer. It starts when people realise they can take part in building the answer too.
Workshop 02. Every intervention becomes a capture line, and the decisive question comes afterwards: which lever did nobody reach for?
Legislative Theatre
Developed by Augusto Boal during his term as a city councillor in Rio de Janeiro, between 1993 and 1996. Text in this section: (in)PULSO — Comunicação Viva.
The technique brings together theatre, citizen participation and the making of public policy. Situations lived by communities and social groups are turned into scenes. Participants watch the conflicts, enter the action, test alternatives and discuss possible changes.
Legislative Theatre widens political participation by letting everyday experience become material for reflection and collective drafting. The citizen stops being only a voter or a recipient of public decisions and starts actively contributing to the creation of proposals.
Workshop 03, with diplomatic participation: authority enters as a horizontal participant and what the group produces can be submitted.
Context Mapping
Froukje Sleeswijk Visser and Pieter Jan Stappers (TU Delft, Industrial Design Engineering), with Liz Sanders. Founding paper: “Contextmapping: experiences from practice”, CoDesign 1(2), 2005. Still taught at Delft as an open course (ID5663). Text in this section: Regen Studio.
This is where the project makes its contribution: Boal's theatre is the generative session. A Brazilian engine drives a Dutch method.
Kleurendenken, thinking in colours
Léon de Caluwé and Hans Vermaak, Leren Veranderen (Boom, 1st ed. 1999, revised 2019): five canonical colours. Huib Koeleman added two in Interne communicatie bij verandering (2013). The most entirely Dutch of the three anchors. Text in this section: Regen Studio.
After the physical exercise, the colours give the group the sentence that matters: it looks like one colour, but it needs another. On stage that becomes the call “troca!”, and the actor switches register.
Frame Creation
Kees Dorst (TU/e Eindhoven and UTS Sydney), Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design (MIT Press, 2015). A nine-step methodology. Text in this section: Regen Studio.
On paper the Field is a map of actors. In the workshop they are bodies in the field, and the interventions reveal the levers that are structurally absent.
The Dutch layer of Workshop 03 is in co-design
An open decision, to be settled with the Consulate-General.
The first two workshops have the full pair. The third has the Brazilian side, Legislative Theatre, and does not yet have the Dutch one. That is deliberate: whoever arrives at the Consulate chooses which Dutch method the workshop on deciding will work with.
The candidates recorded so far:
- Procesmanagement: the Dutch school of steering multi-actor processes, for when no single party is in charge.
- Moreel beraad: structured moral deliberation, used in Dutch hospitals and public services to decide cases where there is no clean answer.
- Kleurpaletten van sturing: the NSOB palettes of steering, on which kind of governance suits which kind of problem.
All three come from the same tradition of governance that produced principles such as water en bodem sturend, where policy decides first what the territory can carry and only then what gets built on it.
Vocabulary of the method
The terms that circulate inside the workshops. Five come from Brazilian theatre, eight from Dutch design.
- BrazilSpect-actor
- The person watching also acts: steps into the scene, replaces the protagonist and tries another route. The figure the whole method is named after.
- BrazilCuringa
- The facilitator. Guides without teaching which reading is the right one, and makes sure no single perspective takes over the room.
- BrazilModel scene
- The scene showing a problem that does not resolve. It is played a second time so the audience can interrupt it.
- BrazilReal image and desired image
- Two sculptures made from the bodies in the group: the situation as it is, and as they wish it were. What has to change sits between the two.
- BrazilDynamisation
- Setting a still image in motion, to see which forces it holds and where it tends to go.
- NetherlandsGenerative session
- In Context Mapping, the exercise that reaches what interviews cannot. In Ponte em Cena, theatre is that session.
- NetherlandsTacit and latent layers
- What people know without knowing they know it, and what they have not yet put into words. The two deepest layers of the Delft model.
- NetherlandsSensitising booklet
- Material sent out days before the workshop so the group arrives already observing their own lives. Thin homework, thick collage.
- NetherlandsThe absent colour
- In Kleurendenken, the route to change that nobody reached for. Usually more diagnostic than the dominant colour.
- NetherlandsParadox
- In Frame Creation, the formulation that jams the problem: we need X, but X prevents Y. Step 2 of the nine.
- NetherlandsField
- Step 4: the wider terrain of actors, values and forces around the problem. In Ponte em Cena these are bodies in the field, not a map.
- NetherlandsFrame
- Step 6, the pivot: the new framing from which different solutions become possible.
- NetherlandsCapture line
- The sentence recording each Forum Theatre intervention: tried [action] by appealing to [value, actor or lever]. Then you ask which lever nobody reached for.
Three workshops, three movements
The whole arc, from the first workshop to the shared agenda.
See the three workshops