How can Theatre (for Living) create social change

Theatre for Living is a professional theatre company focused on issue-based work rooted in community. They create plays based on real people's experiences and use theatre as a powerful medium for behavioral change. They believe that changing patterns of behavior is crucial in creating lasting change instead of just changing structures. They emphasize the importance of storytelling and how we can be the authors of our own stories, allowing us to change the direction of our lives. Well, Theatre for Living is a professional theatre company. We're coming into our 35th year of constant operation, and we do always issue-based work that's deeply rooted in community. So that means that the plays, when there are large projects that are produced or created and performed by people living whatever issues it is that we're investigating, it also means, like with Reclaiming Hope, sometimes there is no play. With this project, everything is going to come out of the audience. The thing about that is that the work is always grounded in real people who live in the real world. The theatre is a very powerful medium, and it is that because it's a symbolic medium. You know, we humans, we don't think in words. If I say to you, fire, you don't see F-I-R-E. You see flames, or you see, I don't know, bullets coming out of a gun. You see some kind of an image. You don't see text. We think in pictures, us humans. It's the reason art is so powerful. And so the theatre can give us an aesthetic space in which we can experiment on a symbolic level with behavioural change. You know, we, I think, trick ourselves into believing that we're prisoners of the structures that we've built around us, and we work to change the structures, but it's actually our patterns of behaviour that create those structures. And so if all we do is work to change the structures and neglect the patterns of behaviour, we're doomed to just recreate the same oppressive structures. And so the theatre is a great place to rehearse behavioural change at a symbolic, at a level that we understand subconsciously. And because of that, it creates real change inside us. We humans, you know, what are we? We are stories, all of us. We are evolving stories. And even when terrible, terrible things drop out of the sky on us, and sometimes that happens, we are still at some level writing those stories. You know, sometimes we're not in control, but, you know, I acknowledge that. But our responses to those terrible events that sometimes drop out of the sky on us, come from us still. Some people don't like to hear this, but it's got to be true. And if we can be the authors of our stories, then we can change the direction of our stories.