It has now been more than a decade since the idea of RAPT took hook. Ten years of so many different places and people and games and intensities, of struggling with finding people and places within institutions who might take the idea seriously - that it is in the realm of play that we are most likely to glimpse the most serious of truths.

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It started almost by accident, some 15 years ago. Then a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, bearing all the gravitas that that title bears, I had an opportunity to conduct a refresher course for Queer activists and academics from across Africa. The course happened to be in Nairobi. Effie, then a student at the IDS, happened to be in the vicinity, so to say, doing fieldwork for her action research project, developing plays in prisons in Malawi. We'd been wanting to work together since we'd first met and with the little bit of extra in the budget she flew down and changed the very imagination of what a course on theory could look like. The course was a success, with the playfulness animating heavy theory and I was eager to bring theatre into the other things i did.

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Over the years we have worked together - either physically or in thinking, in many different contexts in atleast 8 countries. We've worked with queer communities in India and Uganda, with feminist collectives across South Asia and in East Africa, with large scale projects spanning four countries and smaller multi-sited projects in several states across India. Individually we have worked with homeless communities in the UK, with working class transgender communities, and de-notified tribes in India often checking in with each other, thinking together, devising games and exercises and processes together. And along the way we found many more companions, many more folk who came to be infected with the excitement of the method and its possibilities, many of whom have adapted and developed the methods in their own ways. RAPT is by now a community of praxis. 

 

In all this time we have had opportunities to merge with, or rather be absorbed by institutions. This, we have resisted. Partly because from our experiences with institutions it became clear, quite early on, that the work possible in projects, subject always to priorities of funders and logframes and theories of change and ultimately the imperatives of the traditional knowledge forms where the transformation of experience to data robs it of its own meaning and instead infuses it with what passes as argument. We wanted to experiment fearlessly, and this, we felt was best done in an oblique relationship with institutions. Today we feel ready, that what we have not just an idea, but a well developed approach to methodology, with methods and tools and strategies and practitioners. We have something that has the potential to quite dramatically change the way in which research is done. And I do think RAPT is now ready to take on a concrete form.

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We do not seek funding and projects. We offer services. To collectives and community groups committed to understanding beyond tropes they are trapped in. To organisations that tussle between the language of the donor and the actual work that needs doing. To universities, and those in them who believe that research is in fact integral to the role of the academy. To independent researchers going down rabbit-holes, seeking to understand the world in its messy complexity. And to students who have been thrown into the deep-end with no real training in research methods, and often no meaningful mentorship. We offer courses to enable a shift in discourse and research practice.  Some of these are 'bread and butter' courses on research methodology and philosophy and theatre. Some of these are the outcomes of what we've found in our adventures going down rabbit holes, finding ourselves in warrens. Each of these has something we find exciting and important, something we want to share. And finally, we offer workshops of different kinds, from reflective workshops that are designed to help groups and organisations through processes of collective reflection, visioning and  organisational development, to short 'taster workshops' over a weekend so that you might experience the power of the method, to intensive trainings in the methods, and their components so you might become a practitioner yourself.

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The time is right, the stars aligned, the moon in sight and the sea alight. Come out and play!

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akshay