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Participatory Children's Theatre and the Art of Research: The Theatre of Research/Das Forschungstheater 2003–2013

The topic I was asked to speak about today is the most important topic of my work during the last ten years. How to speak about something so big? Ten years ago, I founded what now is called the theatre of research. In the theatre of research, artists, scholars, scientists, and children come together as researchers. During these ten years, I worked as a scholar and as an artist. But as a scholar, I never specialized in children’s theatre. I am a practitioner of children’s theatre; it is not primarily my field of study, but it is my field of experimentation. Therefore, in the first part of my lecture, I will do a tour through a series of projects trying to highlight the principles of this experimentation. Then in the second part, I will develop some more general thoughts about the relation between cultural participation and research. Around the year 2000, I completed a doctoral dissertation in cultural studies and literature. I wrote about the relation between media and time, and I was part of a research program investigating theatricality and performativity as cultural patterns outside of the theatre. After I had spent years as a scholar at a desk and in the library, I missed something: I did not want to prove my theses and arguments only by writing texts about other texts. I wanted to find out if the knowledge produced in cultural studies can be applied to experimental situations. And I wanted to start with the topic of my doctoral dissertation itself—the question, how time is made by society, by protocols of interaction, by media rhythms, by counting devices and knowledge production. For my experimentation, I chose school as a system, in which most of us learn about time, about being punctual, about the difference between break and work, about doing something to prepare for the future, and so on. So, in the first project of the theatre of research, I devised a performative setup to investigate school time with school children. The process and the results of this investigation were documented, and I invited the children to