![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.timtheater.be\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Untitled-design-14.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nThis is something I often miss, which is why it struck me so much. With our geographic spread, older age (we no longer cross the country from morning to night), and contrasting schedules, it is particularly challenging to get us on a stage with many Inspinazians at once. When that happens, there is always something festively nostalgic about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Playback theater with anecdotes from the entire audience.<\/strong> Collective briefings<\/strong> Pulling conversations out of the 1-1 lines, and more to the circle, is an act of democracy. Social-artistic work can contribute immensely to this. To understand each other's perspectives, we need imagination. To have everyone on board, it helps if the body is allowed to participate, if theatrical translation can take place. Theater can represent possible and better futures. If the actors can bring this to life not only through the content, but also through their interaction with each other, it will have enormous power. Mary Overlie, who established \u201cThe Six Viewpoints,\u201d a set of building blocks for theater and dance, paid great attention in her work to democratizing theater and dance, and to the emancipation of performers and audiences. Each time participants, from workshop or performances, samener<\/em> become when they go outside I experience so much job satisfaction. Especially when something has not only been experienced together, but also created together. Something that everyone takes with them to other places. Each in their own way. Same-same, but different. And that is almost the title of our performance on diversity and inclusion,<\/a> About differences together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" About the power of the collective and how theatrical forms of work contribute to it. About walking away from an individualism gone mad.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":4741,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","iawp_total_views":37,"footnotes":""},"categories":[172,330,331],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-diversiteit","category-groepsdynamiek","category-participatie"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-22 15:38:20","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timtheater.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timtheater.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timtheater.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timtheater.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timtheater.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4735"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.timtheater.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4747,"href":"https:\/\/www.timtheater.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4735\/revisions\/4747"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timtheater.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timtheater.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timtheater.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timtheater.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.timtheater.be\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/2024-06-07-21.36.16DSCF3961-web-1024x683.jpg\")
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In our daily theater work, it is even more difficult to be on stage with a large company for a living. For years, I have stubbornly kept going for casts of at least 3 to 5 improvisers, while elsewhere that average is visibly shrinking. As a result, we lose commissions or players are paid slightly less. And yet we continue to stress the importance of performing with a real collective. After all, both in the content of our scenes and in how we appear as a team, we like to contribute these elements:
-Building relational fabric
-Together differences
-Cocreation and synergy
-The power of the collective
Also in my other work I like to focus on groups, past and present. As a teacher in a Freinet school, as a team mediator, as an improviser.
Learn together, differ together, play together.
This preference for the collective, often clashes with the prevailing dominance of the individual. The obviousness of 1\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
<\/li>\n\n\n\n
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We almost all want less rigid hierarchy, but in practice we see that the role of king or empress is still often strongly present on work floors. Or that conversations happen only in lines, rather than in circles. It can be done differently. Beyond individual employees and their leaders, \u201cthe group\u201d often deserves more attention and mandate than it currently receives. Performing arts are a strong inspiration for this. Improvisational theater work \u00e0 la Inspinazie represents a big focus on storytelling and ... interplay. Here are some examples:
Practice tense conversations with role-playing in groups<\/strong>
The way we do simulation learning is not only a rich form of experiential learning, but also a rich form of collaborative learning. How behavior comes across is situational, dynamic and subjective. The more voices that play and reflect in this, the richer the insights, the greater the harvest. Working phenomena in role-play training are also much more varied with groups than in solo training. Each of these work forms offer different learning experiences.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When we take an exploratory approach to a theme, we get a lot of inspiration from listening to many stories. A few well thought-out questions let the microphone circulate smoothly for half an hour in the audience, after which we weave and amplify the anecdotes into a large theatrical patchwork. Cocreation between improvisers and audience members at its finest. During these performances, people realize how universal the personal is, and how personal the universal is. Someone put it this way after a performance for social workers: \u201cIt feels good. Being able to tell our stories, hearing them from each other and seeing them played out so creatively. It takes the heaviness off without denying the seriousness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.timtheater.be\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/pub.png\")
In preparing a custom thematic performance, we survey several people. And we do that as a group, not separately. Part of the work, understanding each other better and writing new pieces of collective stories, then happens in that briefing, even before the performance.
Sometimes that unexpectedly makes for pretty transformative work. We once heard from a working group that they felt that more had happened in that hour of briefing, than in the weeks when a consultant had interviewed people 1-on-1, and where an uncomfortable group session had followed in the working group. People were suspicious then about all that had already crept out from under the waterline in those individual interviews, and the coffee shop conversations that had ensued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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I find that particularly inspiring. Her exercises put a lot of emphasis on observation, on influencing and being influenced, on working together horizontally rather than vertically, on the dialectic between part and whole. These are all things that are also enormously valuable for teams and groups outside the theater.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.timtheater.be\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/viewpoints.jpg\")