Corporate Theatre

What it is

A coach-director takes the group through acting exercises: guided improvisation, comedy sketches, staging a situation, up to a small performance. The tone gets decided beforehand, comic or dramatic, and the length adapts to the time available.

Theatre is a place you can step into and become whatever you want. Let’s try it with a team of colleagues.

Corporate Theatre gets used more and more, thanks to how light it seems set against the endless room it gives for expression. Acting guided by a coach-director lets characters and imagined situations come out, and those often bring hidden tensions to the surface and loosen them, inside a space that stays safe and creative. From guided or semi-scripted improvisation to cabaret sketches, staging a scene or a full short performance: Corporate Theatre is invariably enjoyable and absorbing, for the room it gives to communicate and to become a group.

Corporate Theatre: why does it work?

Because it’s a powerful training instrument.

Through theatre people not only get to live through different states of mind, but to project them onto others and to hear them in other people’s words. It’s a chance to become someone you aren’t, without the fear of judgement that so often stops us at work.

So it’s an exercise in managing your own state of mind. Like when one person starts laughing and suddenly everyone around them has caught it. With the exercises of Corporate Theatre we can tune the frequency we want to vibrate on and take control of it. That matters particularly in some roles: any salesperson knows that going into a meeting without the right mood can change the outcome dramatically.

Working on our own state of mind is always a good exercise, and it’s ideal for starting a virtuous circle that lets people operate in the most functional and positive way they can.

How do you start? By pointing your thoughts at the state of mind you want to reach. After that, the feelings carry on in the direction you’ve indicated.

Why fiction gets where a lecture doesn’t

Corporate Theatre is particularly absorbing on a personal level. It works on the group because it acts physically, emotionally and mentally at once. It builds a team because the interactions are many and happen on every level of a person. The participants watch each other in situations that reveal details and personalities that were hidden. And all of it happens in a setting that is entertaining and good-natured.

The fiction of theatre lets messages get through harmlessly and concentrates strong feeling into contained moments. It becomes a moment for experimenting, for leaving the role you hold every day at home and trying on any number of original masks. That masquerade is often what reveals who people actually are. The day after, the group has seen sides of each other that the office keeps covered.

Given how flexible the method is and how many ways it can be applied, the format fits a great many settings. It runs as an icebreaker at the start of a team building, as an energiser between two talks at a convention, or as a full activity in its own right, and it can be pitched as comedy or as drama. It’s particularly worth considering when there are a few natural performers inside the group who can carry the structure and open the way for everyone else.