Posted: 8th November 2024
Imagining futures through performance
Pedro de Senna – theatre-maker, educator, and futures thinker – joined us for a webinar on how performance can deepen our ability to think about the future. Pedro introduced us to Performance for Futures, a practice that merges theatre and futures thinking to bring alternative futures to life – not just intellectually, but physically and emotionally. It’s an approach designed to bridge the gap between imagining the future and experiencing it, and it calls on all our creative capacities to engage more fully with uncertainty, possibility, and change.
Why theatre? Why now?
Traditional futures work often relies on words, charts, and scenarios. But as Pedro explained, this can leave a gap—a failure to feel futures in ways that matter. Drawing on the work of experiential futurists like Stuart Candy and the legacy of critical pedagogues like Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal, Pedro makes the case that performance, especially participatory, embodied performance, can make future thinking more powerful, more accessible, and more transformative.
Through simple tools like metaphor, status work, and improvisation, performance allows us to:
- Feel our relationship to the future
- Explore alternative narratives
- Disrupt dominant assumptions
- Practice new ways of being and becoming
Pedro’s approach builds on Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, where participants actively reshape a story, rather than just watching it. That spirit runs through Performance for Futures: it’s not about predicting the future, but rehearsing it, challenging it, and collectively imagining what else could be possible.
For example, in one exercise, participants choose an everyday object to represent their future. Then they physically approach the object, noticing their posture, emotions, and even power dynamics. Are they hesitant? Hopeful? Overwhelmed? Empowered? These embodied metaphors open up deep reflection and conversation.
From Refugee Camps to UN Agencies: Five Stories from the Field
Pedro shared five powerful case studies where Performance for Futures has been used in very different settings:
- A Greek island refugee centre, working with unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors using image theatre to explore the future of education.
- An Erasmus+ youth project, where high school and university students used theatre games to unlock emotional and creative insights about their futures.
- A UN foresight network, where participants co-directed a live performer online to embody future cityscapes, flipping power roles and inviting radical agency.
- UNESCO’s World Futures Day, where performance methods were used to animate intergenerational and intercultural dialogues about resilience and inclusion.
- A workshop on indigenous thought, where participants embodied the elements – earth, air, fire, water – to see the future from non-human perspectives
Each example shows how theatre can make futures thinking tangible, relational, and deeply felt, whether you’re a teenager in a classroom or a policymaker at the United Nations.
Pedro closed with a message that resonates: if we want to build better futures, we have to move beyond talking – we have to play, to perform, to feel. Performance for Futures expands traditional foresight, inviting us to use our whole selves – mind, body, and imagination – to navigate the time after now. Pedro’s work reminds us that the future is something we can rehearse, rewrite, and co-create.
Image source: Ceasefire Magazine