What is playable theatre?
Playable theatre broadly describes participatory, immersive theatrical events—embodied experiences where audiences have meaningful agency to influence the outcome—that bring together aspects of games and theatre to create new forms of art and entertainment. These works encompass a wide range of genres in which participants are an active part of the experience, ranging from forms of immersive theatre to live action roleplaying.
Vision
Playable Theatre aims to change the world by enabling creators, artists, and audiences to experience meaningful agency in live performance.
Mission
Playable Theatre supports interdisciplinary creators who are engaged in designing, producing and disseminating interactive live performative works. The organization’s mission is to:
- Provide a 501(c)(3) umbrella to support live, participatory entertainment through access to nonprofit funding opportunities, including grants and individual donations
- Serve as an organizational entity to support individual artists to produce playable theatre works
- Aggregate and share common resources and services, including building a network of venues that host playable theatre works, and provide shared services such as events insurance
- Build a community of practice and support educational programs, such as workshops, symposia and publications, designed to promote knowledge-sharing and development of a common set of terminology, methods, and business models across disciplines
- Under the auspices of Playable Theatre Presents, support production and touring (or virtual distribution) of participatory theatrical experiences, including co-production and international partnerships
- Help build an audience for and promote playable theatre works
Values
- Diversity – we believe that having diverse backgrounds and perspectives lends to creating truly unique and dynamic artistic works and educational programs. We believe in creating visibility for diverse creators, and actively cultivating diverse audiences for our work.
- Inclusion – we believe that being intentional about including voices that have been marginalized is essential to creating a better world both inside the theater and out. Being inclusive allows us to be more sensitive and empathetic to the experience of others, which forces us to grow and learn.
- Participation – we think that allowing for participation is an essential part of creating impactful experiences. Engagement is one of the most powerful tools for transformational thinking, and that necessitates participation at all levels of the creative process. We are constantly trying to improve, and we welcome feedback.
- Agency – our work supports agency at a variety of levels: audience agency, civic agency, and artistic agency. Our goal is to empower various participants in the performance-creation process to have an active and meaningful role in their work and their communities. Importantly we want to provide artists with support to create innovative new works that may fall through the cracks of traditional performance discipline areas.
The Playable Theatre Project is a 501(c)(3) non-profit entity, EIN 84-5128371.