Touring Researcher – A Theatre Tour through Socio-Pedagogical Lenses
Keywords:
theatre, Saimaa Theatre, social pedagogy, democratisation of cultureAbstract
Saimaa Theatre is a touring theatre group of young professional actors in Finland, established in 2014. In the summertime, the theatre group travels around the small villages in the lake Saimaa region for a month by boat. The venues are old community houses. In my text, I describe, through my own experiences and socio-pedagogical perspectives, the Saimaa Theatre summer tour of 2019, that I participated as a researcher. I outline the touring life of the Saimaa Theatre as a communal space, reflect on the way the theatre operates as an example of the principle of cultural democratisation, and portray the Saimaa Theatre as a space that enables encounters. One of the aims of the text and of the research project framing it is to outline what I call the social pedagogy of the theatre and the arts.
