change starts where you are
We create a customized experience with/for your community that will transform shared concerns into invigorating, interactive theatrical dialogue.
Customized Forum Theatre Programs & Residencies
We collaboratively develop Forum Theatre programs with groups & organizations for their communities: young adults to seniors, non-actors & actors alike.
We partner with community and school groups to make their own Forum Theatre Ensembles to facilitate difficult dialogue and action planning that yields real strategies for real struggles created by those most impacted.
What is a program?
- We teach participants from partnering groups to create and perform their own Forum Theatre piece in their community. Program length for developing a Forum Theatre piece is tailored to partner’s needs. The Forum Theatre event may be facilitated by Just Act or a member of your group.
What is a residency?
- A multi-day Forum Theatre intensive training for a group focused on J.E.D.I. concerns while also teaching them T.O. technique. Residencies can culminate in a facilitated public performance of the Forum Theatre piece they created.
What’s the outcome?
Through our unique creation process –meshing Forum Theatre training with other story, devised theatre, conflict transformation and change-based methods– and the resultant performance, your group will transform shared concerns into invigorating, interactive theatrical dialogue, combatting powerlessness in the face of injustice by co-creating and immediately rehearsing new tactics for making real change. This training will bring out your ability to overcome societal and self-imposed limits in order to better include and interact justly with others.
It can be applied to all kinds of work committed to social action and transformation: educational, political, creative, cultural and beyond.
The Just Act workshop at Tyler School of Art was a rare opportunity for the students to speak to the socio-political dynamics that touch every aspect of their experience at Tyler, but so rarely get talked about. Thanks to Lisa Jo's skillful facilitation, a group of students who started out extremely hesitant to perform for each other in any way, let alone to perform the details of their real frustrations and setbacks at the University, transformed dramatically over the course of a few weeks. By the end of the workshop, the students were enthusiastically collaborating on their shared concerns.
Make Your Own Forum Theatre Ensemble
Temple University, Center for the Advancement of Teaching
Annual Graduate Student Orientation & Training
“Dealing with the Tough Stuff”
East Stroudsbourg University
Forum Theatre Residency
“CommUnity”
Tyler School of Art
Forum Theatre Residency
Critical Dialogue
CEIBA Make-Your-Own Forum Theatre Ensemble
Arcadia University, Center for Teaching, Learning & Mentorship
Artist-in-Residence 202-2021
2019: “Just Act, Go Vote,” on tour. Contact Just Act to collaborate with us.
2019: “Flip the Script on Health Injustice”
@Faith and Spiritual Affairs Conference: Health Justice Through storytelling, movement and theatre improvisations, participants will identify and interrogate the scripts that crop up and prevent us from authentic interaction and create barriers to personal and community healing. Come experiment and courageously visualize the world you want by practicing making changes to daily interactions and growing more healthy responses to conflict. Collectively and individually–joyfully, humbly facing fears that have resulted from systematic oppression–we will identify and rehearse practical solutions for transforming our realities for more equitable relationships and community interaction.
Create a customized program
A customized program brings Just Act’s many decades of Theatre of The Oppressed Diversity Training to your students, citizens, team, or office. Programs are shorter than residencies and can last a day, or several. We work with your population to address their unique needs and develop new and powerful ways to create cohesive understanding between members of your diverse space.
Create a Customized Residency
Just Act’s customized residencies delve deeply into the problems facing your community culture by delving deeply into their unique needs using Theatre Of The Oppressed Training as our tool set. Residencies are longer in length than programs. Programs may last several days to a week, however a residency aims to develop and teach the customized tools that your community needs to create log lasting systemic changes that support diversity within an organization.
up next:
Just Act's Annual Forum Theatre Intensive, June 26- 30, 2019
Just Act’s Forum Theatre Intensive is geared towards individuals seeking to develop or deepen and strengthen facilitation skills and training in Forum Theatre and core TO
techniques to improve your ability to effectively engage JEDI concerns–justice, equity, diversity & inclusion–, and use interactive theatre as a tool for personal, interpersonal as well as community repair and change.
Our Forum Theatre Intensive culminates in a free public performance of the Forum Theatre pieces created by participants.
In our 5-day Forum Theatre Intensive, you will learn:
- Foundational training in the theories and techniques of Forum Theatre & Theatre of the Oppressed
- Practice the techniques within an anti-oppression framework developed exclusively by Just Act
developed exclusively by Just Act - Experience spect-actor intervention in a free public performance of the Forum Theatre pieces created by participants
- Engage in self and relational transformation that will support your efforts back at your home sites of changing collective patterns of action and thinking, as well as transforming structures.
We will guide you through the experiential learning process we utilize for noticing and investigating inner and outer work, with curiosity.
- What happens in our bodies, feelings and thoughts when we do a TO activity.
- How these aspects, as well as how we ‘read’ the non-verbal body language of others, inform the action choices we make.
- The challenges to changing our patterns of behavior—ie the ways in which we mobilize social power–in our everyday social interactions, and thus unconsciously perpetuate inequitable systems of oppression.
- What is the impact on our own bodies and minds of these habits, of this social conditioning that may in fact be sabotaging our social justice efforts.
- How to access & utilize our radical imagination to flip the scripts & author new narratives.
Forum Theatre Workshop Details
DATES: June 26- 30, 2019
TIME: 9am-5pm
WHERE: Just Act Studio, 6139 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia PA
COST: $485 (limited financial aid based on need available. Email us to learn more)
REGISTRATION OPTIONS:
$50 registration fee (non-refundable after May 26)
$485 Full amount
Click below to reach the Registration Form!
REGISTRATION DEADLINE: April 26, 2019
I attended the Just Act People’s State of the Union community gathering last week. It was an excellent representation of the diverse experiences and identities within our community. Lisa Jo Epstein and the Just Act(ors) organized the potential in the room in a way that made us all feel like the time we just spent together was not just well worth it, but worthy enough of passing forward to others. We all came in as strangers and left as friends who participated in a grand experience. From the casual introductions and the actors’ instruction to the group dialogue and ending circle, the joyful energy and critical dynamism of a small village was constant. Refreshingly the steady contribution of ideas were just among the best of what could be found in our social marketplace. The experience just made you better prepared to return and continue your best work in other spaces as it reinforced how our actions matter and that we are not alone in the effort to make ourselves and our communities a better place to live.”
“What an amazing event! All of the sudden, when Lisa Jo invited the audience to jump up and try a different way to respond to the challenges of their local schools, the room was transformed. The audience suddenly became problem-solvers, not just observers, engaged in how they might participate in creating a better school system for their children (or their neighbors’ children). By the end of the evening, most left with a plan to get involved!”