About Santé Theatre Warwick
Santé Theatre is a creative concept formed between academics and theatre makers based on a partnership between Arts and the Academy that has been continuing for more than a decade. The artistic director Claudette Bryanston is an award winning theatre director with many decades of experience and the producer Professor Gillian Hundt is a social scientist and eminent academic.
The collaboration was developed to increase the impact and reach of research findings through taking the rich data from primary research in the field of health and social care to create new theatre productions as a way of raising awareness, stimulating debate, and mobilising knowledge through engaging with the public. The facts speak for themselves but the meaning and the stories behind the interviews are harder to share. Through theatre, research can be disseminated beyond the sharing of papers and books to theatres and community spaces and thereby for public engagement. Santé Theatre specifically seeks to appeal to a broad audience as well as to health care professionals.
Each project is considered in terms of its context and produced accordingly though the work could be broadly described as Verbatim Theatre and productions have used a range of theatrical approaches such asa life sized puppet, digital media and forum theatre
Claudette has a strong belief in the importance of the playwright and the craft of writing theatre. This she feels is particularly important when working with verbatim text and source narratives to imbue them with the necessary poetry and dramaturgy to make good theatre.
Santé Theatre has been privileged to work with playwrights and designers of the highest calibre to make the apparently ordinary business of being human as extraordinary as it is.
As a member of the audience said of our collaboration.
- It has come out of research but it is theatre and therefore it has a life of its own.’
- The play is an expression of the themes and questions that emerge from the data.
- Each new play is a response to academic research and has its own distinctive dynamic
Our productions cover a wide variety of subjects and are performed in both theatre and non-theatre venues. Santé Theatre Warwick is currently based in Social Science and Systems in the Health Research Unit at Warwick Medical School. The collaboration has enabled us to utilise the findings from the primary qualitative research to develop theatre.