Bringing the future to life with characters from 2040.
How many people enjoy being in the hot seat? What about being in the hot seat as a character in 2040?
In September 2022, we answered this question by performing scenarios in the form of characters from 2040.
Over the last year, Creative Futures has been collaborating with an incredible research team that is conducting collective research into the critical uncertainties and possible futures affecting prairie-based theatre. As part of this project, we hosted a virtual workshop series over four days in September to provoke further conversation within the prairie-based theatre community to identify a radically optimistic vision for the future of prairie-based theatre along with an action plan to get there.
On Day 1, we wanted the workshop participants to immerse themselves in four possible futures of 2040 in order to facilitate a conversation about the characteristics of a preferred future for prairie-based theatre. Earlier in the year, we co-created the four scenarios and tested the materials with the Reimagine and Rebuild community. We had a written summary of each scenario along with a written description of personas, such as playwrights, stage managers and artists, who might exist in each world. But would this be enough to make it feel real?
With only 90 minutes to engage participants in the scenarios, we didn’t think so. We thought we needed to create a more immersive experience so that the workshop participants could imagine and feel the four possible futures. So that participants could have a visceral reaction to what they liked and didn’t like about each possibility. And it needed to happen relatively quickly.
Since this project is all about the theatre community in the prairie provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, why not act them out? As such, we turned the scenarios into scripts so that each scenario could be performed. In the end, we had four characters from 2040 - Sid, Oz, Alex, and Tuffy - who told the story of their life in the future. We then gave time for the workshop participants to ask questions to each character. Each character was prepared to answer some questions about their world in 2040; however, the workshop participants went deep. They asked all sorts of questions about each of the worlds that forced each character to improvise and also demonstrated how engaged the participants were to understand the characteristics of each scenario.
Participants asked questions like, “What do you and your friends gossip about after shows?”, “How is attendance at theatre experiences?”, and “How has the political divide affected ongoing work around anti-racism and decolonization?”Some of these questions were easy to respond to based on our rigorous scenario development process. Others however, required us to think on the spot and quickly consider what it would mean in the scenario.
At the end of the four sessions, workshop participants were still thinking about their interactions with each character in 2040. They told us that the characters were an “easy gateway into scenarios” because they were performing artists, and that the interactive component made it feel real. They also told us that the scenarios were “beautifully vivid”, “created a deeply engaging process to think of ideas for a prairie future that I might not otherwise have envisioned”, and “allowed for imaginative and provocative ideas to emerge”. The scenarios made participants feel uncomfortable at times and it created an environment where participants had opinions about things that they didn’t even know they cared about. All in all, putting some characters from 2040 in the hot seat worked!
About the project
Christine Brubaker as Principal Investigator at the University of Calgary, Dr. Taiwo Afolabi as co-Investigator at the University of Regina, and Yvette Nolan received a SSHRC Insight Development Grant to conduct collective research into the critical uncertainties and possible futures affecting the professional theatre community in the Canadian prairie provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The research project is using participatory action research and strategic foresight to surface and identify signals, trends, critical uncertainties and generate a range of possible futures with an intention to specifically understand the implications and opportunities for prairie-based theatre companies and theatre artists.
