Bespoke Participatory Formats

Drawing on almost three decades of expertise in creative communication, The People Speak designs original participatory structures tailored to specific briefs. We create immersive experiences that engage audiences in dialogue around complex topics through playful, theatrical formats that encourage genuine exploration and imaginative connections between audience members.

Our bespoke formats mean:

• Responsive Design: Every format is built from scratch to address your unique themes, audience, and objectives—not retrofitted from existing templates.
• Deeper Engagement: Our structures invite tangential exploration through intellectual and physical participation, counter to social media’s demand for instant emotional responses. We create conditions for perspective change to begin.
• Proven Principles: We apply consistent methods across diverse contexts: non-hierarchy, structure without predetermined content, and collective co-creation, ensuring authentic participation regardless of subject matter.
• Creative Synthesis: Our facilitators excel at rapid connection-making, transforming loose impressions from participants into concrete thematic links, adapting in real-time to guide emergent conversations.

Recent Format Examples

Quacktion Time – Participants wore animal masks to debate serious topics through satirical political personas, challenging worldviews through provocative exchanges rather than fact-based discussion.

The Wedding – Two families from different backgrounds navigated divisive topics through Polish wedding games, seeking consensus across strong differences of opinion while exploring shared truths.

Heal the Net – A ritualistic seance used customised Taroblox cards representing social media archetypes to explore algorithms, online influence, and digital culture inspired by alternative healing practices.

Commissioned by Sage and Jester for The Critical Conversations series at The Pleasance Theatre, May 2025

Read more about these formats in our blog “More ways to skin a cat”

 

Quacktion Time 

Heal the Net 

The Wedding

 

All photos by John Williams

This entry was posted on Friday, July 1st, 2011 at 4:31 pm. It is filed under Our projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.