Bespoke Theatre for Diverse Communities
What is Bespoke Theatre?
Born in the inner city, Bespoke Theatre transfers skills for theatre making to groups previously excluded from participation in the performing arts.
Theatre is an art form, and Bespoke Theatre is led by professional theatre practitioners.
It has a strongly developmental perspective, creating a commodity, such as the performance material presented here, while at the same time bringing together a new community; developing relationships, skills, cultural understandings and shared practice. The audience provides the other essential partner in this.
Bespoke: “Specially made for a particular person, organization, or purpose”
The Cambridge English Dictionary
Work is long term with educational provision at the core, maximising young and older people’s opportunities to access new skills. This offers a chance for full participation and employment in all areas of the creative industries, or equally, valuable life skills transferrable to many other walks of life.
The work produced is created within a stable structure and often has a transformational effect upon participants. The processes involved require continuity and a safe space to ensure the wellbeing of the participants.
Theatre pieces may be made, bespoke, for any age, individual, group, or community. It alters the relationship between writer, director and performers, as the content of the work is not imposed from without but made bespoke to fit the conditions of its creation..
It makes change in the social position of theatre arts. It offers compatible employment for arts practitioners who are also raising families, and access to the product and the education for excluded communities. The addition of a previously excluded audience combines to define the kind of work produced.
Subject material reflects the ideas, concerns, and aspirations of the group or community it is created by with and for.
The long term perspective enables a community to educate its young people in the arts,and allows them to grow with in a creative community. This community in the process then creates its own cultural perspective, theatre works, work practices, and pool of knowledge. A new culture is born.