Welcome! It is so exciting to be looking at a website full of colour, life and opportunities for learning – finally after many years of thinking, dreaming and joking. The idea of RAPT began very slowly between akshay and myself as we found ourselves working more and more together and trying to find a name for what our collaboration might be. Since that time it has grown as akshay says, into a ‘community of praxis’ – animated by communities, groups, artists and individuals who have come into contact with our work and gone on to grow new ideas, projects and possibilities.

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I had been making theatre with communities for many years by the time I did my MA and I took some persuading to consider myself a ‘researcher’ – the vision in my head of the bystander with the clipboard and pen observing did not match my experience of playing, running, making theatre with people. And yet, I realised over time that during the process of making theatre together which uses the body, expression, creativity and artistry that we learn a hell of a lot about each other, and the world we live in. Meeting akshay, doing the MA, later a PhD and multiple projects together, over time my imagination of who the researcher is has shifted and expanded. It can be me, and it can be you too. And as Augusto Boal insisted on placing the means of production of culture into the hands of the people, we insist that the means of production of knowledge should also be accessible to everyone. In this way the realities, complexities and demands of people who have been marginalised, invisibilised or violated by dominant power structures may find articulation and mobilisation.

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What began as a series of experiments between two friends has grown into some set methods and approaches that we use, together and separately. We collaborate at times in detail, pouring over workshop plans or methodology outlines, other times it is a late-night Whatsapp message about which game to play with a group tomorrow morning. The sweetest times are when we are in a room together, with a group of people, shoes off, moving our bodies and using theatre exercises to play, to talk and to listen to each other. We do not always agree, our approaches are not always the same, and RAPT and the methods we use, can hold that difference.

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These days I balance RAPT with an institutional role which provides both possibilities and restrictions on our work and our collaboration. So, this is how you find us at this particular moment on our journey together.

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We invite you warmly into this community of praxis – through taking one of our courses, coming to a workshop or engaging our services on your projects. May it be as our workshops are – enlivening, fun, engaging, perhaps a little bit provocative, perhaps a little bit breathless but ending in some expansive understandings and excitement for what they might do in the world.