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Creative Citizenship - A creative citizen is a pro-active citizen, rather than just an active citizen. Creative citizens are people within communities who are inspired to envision what they really want from life and the world they want to live in and empowered to shape the future rather than wait for it to happen to them. They do this through all creative, democratic, legal and peaceful means available to them, and they use applied theatre as a method to rehearse those changes with the wider community. Part of this is implicated by the term vocation – in finding their voice in society participants will also be encouraged to peruse their true vocations.
Communitas - The first ‘initiation’ into creative citizenship is the experience of 'communitas.' This is the glue, articulated by anthropologist Victor Turner, without which a feeling of community does not exist and which is generated by people suspending the identities they have formed around the roles they occupy which are 'functional' within society - such as 'teacher'/'student', 'wealthy'/'poor', 'consumer'/'provider.' A community that does not share a ‘sense of community’ is very difficult to develop.
Transformation - The generation of communitas and the suspension of identities predicates a radical shift from modes of consciousness that involve 'having and doing', to a mode of simply 'being.' This shift is a movement of awareness towards the context of everything – this escapes definitive description but could be called ‘the sense of being alive’, or ‘the present moment’ or simply ‘consciousness.’ It is this orientation towards the context rather than the content of experience that is a consistent action of 'Context Oriented Theatre’ and from where its name is derived. It is also the reason why the transformation sought through the implementation of the activities happen on a fundamental or meta-cognitive level of consciousness rather than simply an intellectual or cognitive level.
Peace - The nature of this transformation in to a 'being' mode brings about a sense of peace, because while we operate in the 'doing' and 'having' mode we have the sense that there is something lacking in our lives, and an expectation that the next moment is going to be better than this one. It is a pattern of behaviour that is the source of conflict on an intrapersonal, interpersonal and social level and truth, justice and security cannot be achieved without awareness of its influence on our actions. Of course peace without truth, justice and security is not real peace but ‘passivity’ and this is why this inner development happens simultaneously with the proactive involvement in envisioning and co-creating strategies for bringing about in society greater democratic accountability(truth), social cohesion (justice) and community safety (security).
Awareness -The longer we are able to 'embody' a mode of being the more we become aware of the mechanism through which we perpetuate our own and others suffering, and the more we are able to respond rather than react to difficulties, thus breaking the cycle of inner stress and outer conflict. This growing awareness of the context of our experience allows what is manifest through Dynamic Platforms to have lasting value and a wider scope of relevance than would be achieved through discussion based ‘working out’ of solutions. This is because the changes sought in society are embodied in the change in the beliefs, attitudes and behaviours of the participants and are multiplied through creative acts with the wider community.
Transcultural Dialogue – With growing mindfulness as a basis for development and change, cross border co-operation becomes a crucible in which to explore our conditioning and to celebrate the diversity of culture without being threatened by different perspectives. Thus, with each circuit a deeper sense of creative citizenship, a deeper transformation and a deeper awareness is unfolded in the community.
Students of the Republic of the Imagination, because they are engaged continually for a year in the supporting practices and the methodologies are able to follow this cycle deeper and embody awareness in the projects with partner organizations, helping to facilitate the spiral movement of the group mind through the cycle. This is particularly important when working with diverse groups that might contain communities in conflict.
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