Hello, my name is Daniele, I am Italian but I’ve been living in Madrid for 8 years. Love and theatre brought me here where I’m in an organization called TR3S social (meaning Revolutionary Theatre for Social Empowerment). For us, theatre is a tool for collective empowerment, as well as personal and social transformation. We work, among others, with a methodology called Forum Theatre which originally comes from the Theater of the Oppressed and we re-elaborated to adapt it to our social context. Let me tell you my experience with the E-motive program.

Hi Daniel, my name is Veronica. I’m here because my organization wants build on previous knowledge developed by E-Motive in The Netherlands. How can we do that? Let’s do a mapping of needs and existing knowledge: we want to promote different ways of development education and citizen cooperation. Why? We believe social transformation comes about when people collaborate on the basis of equality and respect.

Yes, of course! There is a method called the Aladdin factor consisting in writing wishes on a notebook to make them occur. I never did it, but if I had, I would have surely written this.

That’s how I came across Daniele and 3 Social. His organization presented a proposal for a mutual learning exchange with an organization in India. They want to learn from India how to empower people through arts and Theater in Spain to help them overcome complex social difficulties.

The Forum Theatre methodology was born as a theatrical trend in Brazil of the 70´s, called the Theatre of the Oppressed. It was systemized by playwright, actor, director and theatre pedagogue Augusto Boal (1931-2009), inspired by the work of the educator and theorist Paulo Freire.

Its objective is to transform reality by breaking the “fourth wall” of classical theatre and involving society in searching solutions to their common problems.

The path of politics and spirituality have to come together. But spirituality is not necessary to believe in God. Just simply believe that we are part of something bigger and that's a systemic vision derived from the "Oneness"

That’s what has been lost in Europe with our cartesian rational square vision.

This is the core of Emotive, starting to think: how are my reality glasses? What are they made of? How do I remove them and what do I tell others?

India is a highly divided society with great inequalities. Within this context the lower class, mainly workers and farmers, has no community sense and is usually divided by religion and other factors. We work with theatre to to help them find their own identity, potential and power .

It is also amazing how you take the Forum Theatre method a step further by creating a local human rights committee to change reality far beyond the theatre play, making policy proposals to transform their reality.

Exactly, my father used to say: in Forum Theatre the real job comes after the theatre.

How sad. In India we already have communities. How disintegrated a society could be that you have to build a community?

Here you have to work hard first to find a community or work hard with people to build a community, and only then start working with them.

This is the first chapter of a new book which has to do with replicability in the local, european and global scales. And it begins with connecting our work in India, Spain and Holland and starting to think globally.

We are talking about student exchange programs. We want the next generation of Jana Sanskriti to interact globally. We will act to make the intercultural exchanges grow. Now is the time .

In India, every two years we have our biannual festival called “…” and Theatre of the Oppressed professionals from all over the world come to participate. There is one week of workshops and this ends up in 3 or 4 performances. So the participants they go to the villages and they perform in front of hundreds and thousands of people. I would like to do the same here.. Performing with the Africans or the people from Bangladesh in Madrid. Traveling and performing it in different areas or Madrid. Why not make the first Festival of Theatre of the Oppressed here?

Your ability to intervene in society is amplified through this network of relationships and allows you to expand your reach. you can have new partners in an international network and you have also access to new sources of funding

E-motive is creating out-of-the-box collaborations that have real and profound impact in the lives of communities worldwide. We need time, money and effort to replicate this innovative methodology. And we already have time, effort and passion.