An ethos of socio-economic transformation through transparency

We are all aware of the trickle down effect of a global economy but there is a growing belief that change comes from the bottom up and it is up to the individual within the community to break the oppressive silence and attitude of resignation that plagues our society due to our cultural inheritance.

There is a much greater public awareness and unrest with the repetitive rhetoric of rapacious imperial forces but there hasn't been a collaborative voice to challenge the class system and corporate view with its particular notions of ownership, creativity and power.

Theatre, documentary and technology are in the process of creating such a voice that cannot be stifled due to the structure of the World Wide Web, designed to resist the social and hierarchical order: Few are those who have not heard of Wikileaks or the Zeitgeist Movement that resist and challenge our present capitalist oriented consumer economy. This shift in our consciousness may also be at heart of entertainment moving away from dramatic practices and conventional staging to postdramatic practices.

Our interest lies somewhere between the postdramatic and predramatic performances. Both may seem somewhat lacking in structure and overly subjective, thus alienating generations of spectators of dramatic genres, still very much alive and part of humanity’s cultural inheritance. However if you’re going to bring about a transformation in our way of thinking about our environment everybody needs to understand the motivation behind any movement to make these changes of their own volition.

While the younger practitioners amongst us embrace this move away from dramatically structured entertainment towards multi-media performance pieces our goal would be to marry the old and the new styles of theatre and performance both live and virtual, in keeping with the Old Comedies of political satire and parody, such as Aristophanes’ The Frogs and the New Comedies of social ritual and marriage. The objective is to highlight the similarities between different social classes and how comedy can be used as a source of social correction and communication to free us all from our self-inflicted oppression, which includes our so-called oppressors who are just as much victims of our poor socio-economic systems.