The Copenhagen Interpretation gives broad agency to its participants: our key performance indicators are a collection of unique individual experiences.
Rather than regarding data gathering and evaluation as a process of study, we’re now thinking of those things as another experiential tool available to participants.
By giving participants the ability to decide what data they capture about themselves, we are centering the process of evaluation around what they are personally moved to capture, aiding their engagement with the experience, cognitively and emotionally.
When we came to discuss how to usefully frame the invitation to capture information, we examined what we think the actual, social value of theatre could be, and used that to create an invitational framework in three sections that have an unsurprisingly strong connection to the challenges facing society today.
We have a crisis of socialisation. According to Home Office statistics, levels of hate crime have been increasing annually for over a decade.
We have a crisis around emotional wellbeing. UK government data from 2021-22 suggest around 80% of people experience loneliness.
We have a crisis around information and understanding. Society is polarised through the propagation of false information, and algorithms that trap people in echo chambers.
Social
To be a strong society, we need to be able to connect with one another. In order to begin socialisation, everybody needs to have access to be included, and then the freedom to make meaningful new connections and deepen existing connections with others locally, or with the wider world.
In abstraction, storytelling cannot help but be a genuinely shared experience. The Copenhagen Interpretation aims to facilitate a body of people coming together around theatrical storytelling, to cohere and be free to develop. The aim is not to accumulate as many people as possible, but rather, to make deeper, stronger connections.
Emotional
People need to be able to freely feel, to experience, openly express and explore emotions, to understand what they are feeling, be able to process those emotions, pass through them and emerge.
Exposure to a diversity of emotional responses in others is a big part of our personal emotional development. Emotional development is not about accumulation of moving experiences, it’s about personal transformation.
Insight
Our ability to be responsive and adapt, to make sense of the world, make good decisions, requires diversity of information and the creativity to process it.
Being exposed to stories in a way that gives us the potential to clarify information, broaden knowledge, deepen understanding from diverse perspectives, enables us to draw conclusions that are fundamentally socially-focused.
Next week I’ll post about how we think about what constitutes ‘value’ in theatre.
Click here for the first post in this series: Barriers to Theatre
Click here for the previous post: Evaluating Impact
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