The Republic of the Imagination is a Theatre Company and a School of Theatre.

Its core citizens are a team of professional theatre practitioners and volunteers who follow a curriculum that explores theatre as a vehicle for investigating the possibility of finding out who we really are.  The one year volunteer program brings together young artists from all over the world to learn through creative intercultural dialogue about Context Oriented Theatre.  With a program of projects in countries throughout Europe, the Republic travels for 8 months of the year, running workshops, co-devising and performing with diverse communities. 

The Republic of the Imagination came about through a desire to go deeper

Over the last ten years the Wales based Theatre Company, Cynefin (www.cynefin.org.uk) have worked with countless youth and arts organizations to develop Context Oriented Theatre.  The Republic of the Imagination was born out of the desire of many participants in those projects to go deeper into this methodology, not on a project to project basis but as a way of living.  Cynefin Artistic Director, Iwan Brioc hosted a seminar in North Wales where several theatre practitioners expressed a similar desire and the Republic was born.

“Augusto Boal has said ‘Theatre is the art of looking at ourselves’ but when I look I find nothing…nothing and everything at the same time. What if theatre, rather than explore the content of consciousness, explored its context? What if, rather than stage the travails of life that provide so much material for drama, we shine the spotlight of attention on this sense of being alive?  Not what is seen and heard but that which is hearing and seeing; not what is being felt but that which is feeling. Then the stage necessarily becomes awareness itself and the drama unfolds from the moment…this moment….and this moment.

 

Am I meaning here the moment when I wrote this sentence or the moment when you read it?  In the republic of the imagination they are the same moment” Iwan Brioc

 

The Republic of the Imagination is a Creative Movement

 

Imagine if education was a movement…a creative movement with the aim of bringing about awareness…an awareness of creative movement. 

Bateson said that learning was perceiving ‘the differences that makes a difference’ but in modern society’s blizzard of information those subtle differences in our sense of self that really make a difference can become obscured and often decided for us by 24 hour media and marketing. Our homeostasis – the physical response to what endangers us and what enhances us, can become mechanized by market or even worse, politically driven imperatives that monopolize our attention and implant the desire to consume, to identify or even to go to war. Therefore much of our investigation with Context Oriented Theatre has to do with staying with the experience until we see a change and reciprocally, noticing how by bringing awareness to our experience changes that experience.

The curriculum is divided into awareness of body, mind and voice and implements a program of creative intercultural dialogue projects with communities throughout Europe and beyond. Taught modules introduce the methods we use in these projects and include Dance, Physical Theatre, Mime, Theatre of the Oppressed and Sensory Labyrinth Theatre.  The appliance of these methods in partnership with diverse communities unfold within the ‘paradigm’ of Context Oriented Theatre and this is supported through practices such as Feldenkrais, healing voice work, Chi Kung, Permaculture and Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction.  Modules in Project Management also give the students the knowledge and skills to develop and implement their own projects towards the end of the year.

However, the real learning involves a growing awareness that meaning starts where knowing ends and involves exploring our identity beyond what we do and what we have.  Theatre, as a crucible in which identities are conjured and dissipate in a mater of moments, is the perfect place for this to happen.

 

“Socrates was famous in Athens for saying, “Know thyself.”  It is said that one of his students said to him, “Socrates, you go around saying “Know thyself,” but do you know yourself?”  Socrates was said to have replied, “No, but I understand something about this not knowing”. Jon Kabat-Zinn

 

The Republic of the Imagination is a member of INFACCT

INFACCT stands for International Network for Awareness, Creative Citizenship and Transformation and is a network of 15 organizations that work through the arts with young people at risk from social exclusion (www.infacct.org). Most of the Republic volunteers are sent and supported in their home countries by these organizations. 

The Republic of the Imagination is a community

Living, travelling and working together brings to the Republic a sense of community.  Whilst there are structures, roles and responsibilities which help this community function the sense of community comes not from this but from ‘communitas’.  Communitas is a quality identified by anthropologist, Victor Turner, which comes about through a group of people sharing experiences of liminality: moments where the boundaries between time and space, you and I, inner and outer become fluid.  Theatre provides the safe context for this to happen and while we give the experience of communitas to the communities with which we work and too whom we perform we also receive communitas.