• Share on Facebook
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Linkedin
  • Share by email
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Linkedin
  • Share by email

The Good Chance theatre, which started as a makeshift performance space in a Calais refugee camp, continues to perform and host workshops with migrants across the world – including an upcoming run in San Francisco. Amelia Parenteau charts the rise of a company committed to ‘radical inclusion’.

Good Chance Theatre was started by two Brits, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, when, in 2015, they passed through Calais, France, on their way to Germany and they saw the makeshift refugee camp that had formed there. Many theatremakers might feel the need to share the refugees’ story with the world, but first Murphy and Robertson wanted folks in the camp to have “a platform to express themselves,” explained Dina Mousawi, Good Chance’s creative producer. So they decided to construct a theatre there in the shape of a geodesic dome, which has since become Good Chance’s signature pop-up venue; they spent seven months there in total. Vincent Mangado, a Théâtre du Soleil company member who joined their effort, described that first dome as a place “where everything could be spoken, a place of peace, a nerve center of the jungle, where you can share stories or throw a party, not just a theatre... Keep reading on American Theatre