In the early 1970s, dramaturge Marianne Van Kerkhoven founded political theatre company Het Trojaanse Paard. Specific to this group, and to related groups around them, was the conviction that art served a purpose beyond art: to bring about a process of social awareness and provide audiences with strategies to transform their everyday reality. The moment of performance was given an intention for the reality around it.
This form or technique was not new and was not unrelated to previous and parallel developments in theatre history, such as practices from the early-twentieth-century avant-garde or from contemporaries like Brazilian theatre-maker Augusto Boal. Boal conceived art as a 'rehearsal for reality', as a rehearsal space where the potentiality of possible future scenarios can be explored. This formative, speculative quality is re-emerging strongly in our arts landscape today.
In her research, Esther Severi compares contemporary, socially engaged artistic practices she is involved in as a dramaturge with strategies of Het Trojaanse Paard and various transhistorical and transgeographical references. In doing so, she asks how we can connect engaged, pedagogical theatre practices throughout history in the search for a political theatre for the future.