Make theatre that makes community! by Adam Power-Annand

In 1990 I graduated from Rose Bruford College (RBC) with a BA Community Theatre Arts (CTA). The CTA course had been highly influential in preparing actors for a world of community theatre and theatre-in-education. However, despite its validation as a degree in 1988 it was soon to be closed down. By the time I graduated the last intake of students were completing their first year and the course had been replaced by an ‘actor-musician’ pathway of the acting degree. The change was in some ways inevitable. The CTA course had a political framework. It espoused the idea of collective action to challenge social inequality and yet we were ten years into a government that started from the principle of individualism. 

‘Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.’ Margaret Thatcher 1987. Interview in Woman’s own magazine. 

Twenty-two years before that claim from the then Prime Minister, Coventry Belgrade Theatre established the first Theatre-In-Education (TIE) team. A troupe of actors that toured plays to local schools and developed innovative techniques involving children in the action, working collectively to explore social issues. This rapidly became a national movement and TIE teams funded by local authorities proliferated. There was work for actors and for a brief period the CTA course at RBC trained many of them. In1988 the Education Reform Act broke up the power of local authorities, it devolved budgets and brought in a National Curriculum that had little or no space or desire for this creative and politically explorative work.  

While the TIE movement may have stumbled at this hurdle, its people, ideas and practices did not. Those people, ideas and practices can be seen now in the many community theatre, youth theatre and creative education programmes and in the ‘applied theatre’ and ‘theatre for social change’ movements.  

And now full circle – on Friday 8th December I return to RBC to work with students on the Theatre for Social Change BA. I will be running a session on using theatre to support children to have a creative voice. We will touch on the interaction of collective support and individual action.  

The political circumstances are hugely different, some of the particular social challenges are new, but the drive is the same: 

Make theatre that makes community! 

Adam Power-Annand 

Theatre maker and CEO Speech Bubbles