quality / integrity / innovation / subversion

These are the values at the heart of all our work, and the criteria by which we will judge our success

quality

All our work, regardless of scale, will be of the highest artistic quality. We will seek to work with artists and organisations to deliver participatory and performance work of the highest calibre and ability.

integrity

We will ensure that all our work has an ingrained integrity. We seek to educate, enlighten, reflect and inspire through our work, and we will strive to ensure that all those who experience our work are enriched, respected and informed by it.

innovation

proteus will strive to redefine and explore the concept of ‘theatre' We define ‘theatre' as any performance art. We will seek to blur the edges of what is considered to be the performer/audience relationship. We will seek to work with diverse art forms and diverse artists, exploding the myth of theatre as an irrelevant force. Our work will be exciting, relevant and life-affirming. Above all our aim will be to entertain and enlighten all who encounter our work.

subversion

Our work will seek to subvert the view that ‘theatre' is an elitist form, creating opportunities for individuals to participate and make work alongside professional theatre practitioners. We will also subvert the idea that the relationship between performer and audience is always a passive one, creating performance work that has the capacity to evolve and respond to the audiences it reaches. We will place the artist at the centre of the work, but the inspiration and driving force for all the company's work will come from the communities with which proteus works.

proteus is a theatre company that believes the audience is as important as the artist, and that to create truly dynamic and relevant theatre the audience and artist must inspire each other's imagination.

Changing the space

In addition to traditional theatre spaces, we will make work anywhere; parks and open fields, office buildings, churches, museums, aircraft hangers, empty shop units, lifts, even buses. We define a performance space as anywhere a performer can be seen by one other person.

We will not always ask the audience to sit in front of the performer, they may move with the action, be encouraged to discover the performance by exploring the space, or may participate in some or all of the performance themselves.

Changing the relationship

We believe that for theatre to be truly relevant, artists must respond directly to their audience. Traditionally this dialogue casts the audience as a passive partner, only able to comment on completed work.

We will seek to re-define that relationship, and place the dialogue between artists and community at the centre of all our work.

We will create a circular shape of communication and response; an environment where an artist will be inspired by a community and will respond with work that can express their views and concerns. This could be new work, or could equally be the re-working of a familiar or classic text, either way there must be a tangible link to a community with which the artist has worked.

Changing the definition

We define ‘theatre' as any performance art, and will utilise any art form to enhance and deepen the experience for audience and participants. We will create work collaborating with artists from different disciplines where appropriate, and will develop the use of multi-art form work, enabling the artists working with us to be inspired and informed by each other via the working process.

We want to blur the boundaries between what is described as ‘participatory' theatre and ‘professional' theatre. We will strive to establish a cohesive dialogue with our audiences to holistically inform the artistic vision.

We will establish that dialogue through the pursuance of three distinct strands of work:

1 Large-scale, multi-art form participatory work

We believe that the eradication of ‘storytelling' as a common skill has contributed to the fragmentation of communities and the eroding of collective memory and emotional connection.

We seek to re-connect geographical communities through our work, and to establish empathetic dialogues between the socially excluded and the wider community.

It is through ‘storytelling' that we will enable participants from marginalized sectors of society to engage with the majority, and to deepen understanding of their experience. In order to ensure participants can unlock their artistic potential we will utilise artists from various disciplines to impart skills capable of informing the ‘storytelling' process.

This work will always involve ‘theatrical' performance, but will shift the boundaries of where and how that can be presented.

This is work that will often begin as ‘issue-based', or may be inspired by geographical history, an architectural stimulus or a tangible desire from a particular section of society to engage with the arts.

This work will always involve participants working alongside professional artists on an equal footing: the participants will directly inform the content, occupying a position of knowledge in relation to the professional artists. The artist will impart skills, and will occupy a position of knowledge in terms of the delivery of the final piece.

This work will ideally find an audience amongst those we would not normally hear the stories of those who made it due to geographic, economic or cultural distance.

2 Artist-led performance work

This work will be initiated and created by professional artists informed by experiences amassed from working on large-scale participatory projects. This work may also take its inspiration from a piece of text, visual art, choreography, film or photographic image. Whatever the inspiration, the work will evolve into a live performance piece created and performed by professional artists, touring beyond the geographical community that inspired it.

Where appropriate the community or individual that inspired the work will be involved in the dramaturgical process, but the over-riding ideology and principle of this strand of work is the exploration and integrity of an artistic vision.

This work will not always be newly created or commissioned. Where an existing text inspires an artist, a process of dialogue will begin with groups or individuals in contemporary society who can inform the exploration and interpretation of the text, ensuring its relevance and vitality.

In this way we hope to embed a social integrity into the work, pushing the artists involved to move into deeper levels of interpretation and to interrogate existing texts from a 21 st Century perspective.

We will strive to reach a point where artists are able to trace their connection with a text to a point of encounter with the wider community, fully establishing the inspirational circle from artist to the community/audience and back again.

3 Long-term, regular work with specific communities

This strand will encompass the establishment of regular workshop groups and courses with disparate communities in the geographical area closest to proteus .

This will include the development of our work with individuals affected by disability and mental health issues (for example the ‘Breakthrough' project which for the last five years has worked with this specific community), as well as the creation of a regular workshop group for adults wishing to engage with professional artists.

proteus will also establish deeper links with young people via intensive workshop courses in collaboration with other arts organisations across the South East region.

These regular, core groups will become proteus ' community ‘family' . We will work to develop these groups to the point where they can become a resource for ourselves and other artists, providing a ‘think tank' or development group, able to comment on and facilitate the exploration of possible models of participatory work. These groups would enable an artist to fully research and evaluate a project model before it was run with an undeveloped group. This resource would prove invaluable to artists experimenting with the traditional models of participatory work, and would enable the proteus ‘family ‘ groups to encounter radically different art forms and artists.

In this way we will seek to establish a national reputation as a resource for the creation and development of innovative, high quality participatory work.