ABSTRACT
The Dacapo Theatre consists of management consultants and theatre people plus a small administrative staff. In the summer of 2004 there were sixteen people working full time with organizational clients from the public and private sectors. Dacapo started some fifteen years ago with one actress and one internal consultant in a can factory in Denmark. Although they were not aware of it, they were part of a movement using theatre in organizations in a number of different countries. The work at the can factory developed slowly and after five years the two founders left the factory to form a professional, independent company. Today, Dacapo is well known in Denmark for its capacity to engage small and large audiences in a live dialogue about change processes taking place in organizations. At first, the method of working was mainly based on the Forum Theatre techniques developed by Augusto Boal ([1979] 2000, 1992, 1995). Forum Theatre is an interactive form of theatre where the audience is involved in trying to find solutions to problems raised in the play. Apart from performing a scripted play, this demands a high degree of improvising from the actors. The Dacapo consultant then facilitates this process between the audience and the actors. Dacapo has, however, developed these methods over a number of years. Where Boal talks about people as oppressors and oppressed, we talk about different people in an organization having different perspectives. Where Boal looks for
solutions to problems, we are more concerned with how everyone in an organization may engage themselves in an evolving and continuous change process. The work of Dacapo used to take an event format, where we spent only one day with the same group of people in a company. It is now slowly turning towards being involved at different levels in the organization, with different issues and on a longer-term basis.
