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Legislative theatre and the civil society covenant

Katy Rubin, director of The People Act, considers how to bring government and citizens together into creative collaboration for effective participatory democracy.

Katy Rubin
7 min read

Local government and national advocacy organisations have recently caught on to the power of ‘legislative theatre’ as a forum for collaboration between civil society, government stakeholders and communities.

But what is legislative theatre, and how could it help both the arts sector and the government bring the pledged new civil society covenant to life?

‘We are all actors’

In his message for World Theatre Day in 2009, Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal, the creator of Theatre of the Oppressed, declared: “We are all actors: being a citizen is not living in a society, it is changing it.”

A city councillor in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1990s, he expanded the theatre’s practice to encompass legislative theatre – creative, participatory democracy, bringing together residents and policymakers in a theatrical process that shifts formal power dynamics and co-creates innovative solutions to entrenched social problems.

This practice, which has been growing in both practical applications and recognition across the UK and globally over the past decade, offers one way to realise the government’s new civil society covenant within and beyond the arts sector.

According to gov.uk: “The new covenant is designed to harness the knowledge and expertise of voluntary, community, social enterprises and charities to deliver better outcomes for communities right across the country.” It is currently seeking examples of best practice. So what is our role as arts professionals and institutions in “tackling disadvantage… and supporting democracy and community voices”?

Cultural institutions’ multi-faceted role

Inspired by Boal’s message, we can stretch his thinking further. The ethos of legislative theatre (LT) asserts that every citizen is not just an actor, in the sense of being capable of taking civic action, but also a policymaker.

All residents are both experts in our own lived experience of legislation, and creative beings who can dream up, design and help enact new public policy. Cultural institutions have a multi-faceted role in facilitating that expertise.

As community conveners, with thousands of residents who associate their institutions with joy and belonging, those institutions can issue an irresistible invitation to their audiences. As venues, they can become alternative and welcoming spaces for participatory democracy.

And as artistic entities committed to creativity, storytelling and collaboration, their values and skills can reshape formal policymaking processes – often exclusive, boring and mechanical – into the fun, inclusive and imaginative spaces we need to fix some of our most urgent problems.

Recent legislative theatre initiatives

Dozens of recent LT initiatives have resulted in concrete policy changes on healthcare, housing and homelessness, disability rights, and more (chronicled in a new open-access LT resource hub), commissioned by local governments including Greater Manchester Combined Authority and Medway, Glasgow and Coventry city councils, as well as national charities including Trussell Trust and Groundswell.

How does it work? Community members create and perform original plays based on their lived experiences, addressing local or national policy challenges. Following open dialogue about the problems, audience members step onstage to improvise alternatives to the problems presented, testing new rules in real time.

Then audiences, advocates and policymakers collaboratively shape these ideas into specific policy proposals, followed by deliberation and debate. Finally, everyone present votes on the proposals, and policymakers make commitments to action.

In Medway, an LT initiative overhauled the system by which rough sleepers access speedy support and accommodation from the council; while in Greater Manchester, an LT event helped bring about major changes in public transport to support safety for women and girls, including active bystander training for all transport staff and a communications campaign against sexual harassment. These are just a few examples out of many.

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Legislative theatre project in association with Glasgow City Council. Photo: Stephen Hosey/Glasgow City Council

The value of creativity in participatory democracy

In my experience designing and facilitating such processes, government leaders and community groups can at first be wary of arts-based approaches to participatory democracy, regarding them as reputationally risky, lacking seriousness, or too abstract to contain the complexities.

However, theatre is an ideal mechanism to enable the common steps of policymaking: understanding the human impacts of existing public policy and practice; imagining alternatives on the macro and micro scales; testing changes onstage that can be realised offstage; and working across differences in an environment of experimentation and mutual trust.

After taking part, policymakers often express a new understanding of the value of creativity in participatory democracy. Molly Bishop, former strategic lead of homelessness for Greater Manchester, reflected: “We say it a lot, but this really is doing things differently. Challenge, creativity, comedy – all in the name of policymaking.”

Rebuilding trust

The biggest barrier to the advancement of the new civil society covenant may be the feeling of broken trust between residents, charities and government after decades of austerity, increasing inequality and instability for charities, especially arts organisations.

Legislative theatre facilitates the rebuilding of trust in three ways. First, through the aesthetic and emotional experience of watching the play, diverse stakeholders arrive at a shared understanding of the problems.

Second, by improvising policy solutions onstage, policymakers and residents have a shared experience of problem-solving. And finally, doing the work of governance and making commitments in an artistic setting require shared risk-taking.

These three trust-building ingredients map directly onto the covenant’s four key principles: recognition of the expertise of civil society; partnership which encourages arrangements that facilitate collaboration; participation, empowering communities in decision-making; and transparency, supporting knowledge exchange and honest dialogue.

A responsibility to respond

In the consultation for this covenant, the government asks: “How do we harness the excellent ability of civil society to innovate and find new solutions to societal problems?” The covenant can be understood as a direct invitation, and the arts sector has both the opportunity and the responsibility to respond.

Legislative theatre is just one tool; arts institutions are poised to creatively adapt such processes to fit their community’s strengths and needs. Other methods have already been engaged by the cultural sector, including Birmingham Museums’ recent and groundbreaking citizens’ jury, which invited residents to co-create a new strategy at a time of crisis and transformation.

While the arts sector can and must rise to meet this moment, it’s more than simply providing a service to the public and the government. The LT process can also be deployed to strengthen the sector itself. By engaging audiences and neighbours in participatory decision-making about budgets, programming, staffing, etc., arts institutions might build trust with their own local communities, reaching new audiences and creating a sense of belonging and shared ownership.

An effective civil society covenant should be mutually reinforcing, moving both government and civil society towards equitable outcomes. Perhaps, if the arts sector leads the way, creative participatory practices will spark a new ‘cultural communities covenant’ – transforming audiences into cultural citizens, capable of not only patronising arts institutions, but also helping to transform them.