.com is for Community!

Welcome to my website as a freelance practitioner and consultant in Applied Theatre.  It's a place to record work and engage in dialogue with colleagues and communities that I encounter outside of my role as director of the Sensory Labyrinth Theatre company Cynefin and the International School for Context Oriented Theatre The Republic of the Imagination.  It's also a place to read about and help me develop my thoughts about Context Oriented Theatre.  Of course, it's also a place to find out whether you would like me to work with your community.

I grew up in the 70's in Wales and remember vividly this feeling of 'community', like I remember how blue the skies  and how long the summers were.  Feeling like you are part of a community is one of the most wonderful feelings.  It's not just about sharing something in common; it's about enjoying and celebrating the experience of being alive together at a particular place and a particular time. But this feeling is getting scarce as many of us tend to get our feeling of being 'together' from watching the same programmes on television, from shopping at the same supermarket or from supporting some team or cause against another.  Are we not like so many ships passing in the night, feeling intimacy with a handful of people and often not knowing anything about our neighbour...and preferring it that way?

Society creates an order for us to live by.  One of roles, rules and responsibilities which let us know our place in the world, and in this we feel safe.  But community is never created by playing out these roles, following these rules and shouldering these responsibilities...they only separate us from each other.  Community is created in the spaces in between...

There is not a community; be it a school, an organization or a disparate group brought together by circumstance, which does not benefit from disembarking from the known way of doing and having things and playing with the notion of seeing and being differently.

George Bateson said that learning happens when we see the differences that make a difference, and the only way to see these is to step out of the ruts of ordinary perception.  My mission is to help communities step out of those ruts and discover themselves anew. The tools which I use to this end are training, workshops and projects that I have been co-creating with communities across Europe in the last ten years.  Please get in contact if you want more information.