Our Methodology

Our practice is inspired by our name. We "bounce" everything. Our work sits at the intersection of culture, health, and education.

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For 20 years, we've been bringing people together to tell stories and make theatre in non-traditional spaces. How we do that has matured as our team learns and collaborates with educators, alternative learning practitioners, sensory occupational therapists, and speech and language therapists to better understand how you create an environment that recognises everyone arrives in a session shaped by individual lived experiences.

How we work is shaped by four principles:

  - Space

  - Body

  - Agency

  - Play

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Space

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We begin by finding the space and asking what the space makes possible.

Our spaces are tools, not containers. We work in non-traditional theatre spaces because they can reduce practical barriers to access and change how people experience participation. A classroom can become a stage. A hall can become a world. A café can become a rehearsal room.

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We also think about how people use a space together. Where can someone move? Where can they retreat? Where can they watch without being watched? What does the group need the space to do?

During lockdown, we noticed that Zoom gave some young people freedom to participate differently off screen, typing only, acting across tiny squares. We've carried that logic into our in-person work: rearranging  urniture, creating breakout zones, building scripts from pictures, and making room for writing, movement, and improvisation to happen side by side.

Space is the first invitation: you don't have to fit yourself to the room. We change the room so you can participate.

Body

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We pay attention to what is happening physically in the room. It is the physical foundation of theatre - breath, rhythm, movement, space, energy, presence. We think about what bodies are telling us, including when someone needs to move, pause, retreat, repeat, regulate, or simply be. This is where co-regulation becomes part of the practice. Games, visual art, objects, movement and technology can help people find calm, focus and connection without requiring them to explain what they need.

Into the Forest started as a scripted plan. It became scenes documented through drawing, text, and muscle memory, so a young person who couldn't access line-learning could still access rehearsal through their bodies.

We observe the body before we make demands of it.

 

Agency

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Participants have agency over how they take part.

 

Some people participate independently, some in groups, some by drawing, some by performing, some by watching before joining in. We don't assume that the most visible form of participation is the most meaningful. If someone changes how they want to take part, we listen. If something makes them happier, more comfortable or more engaged, we make space for that choice. We don't redirect someone back to the plan simply because the plan was what we arrived with.

Sometimes that means changing the activity. Sometimes it means changing the role. Sometimes it means changing the work itself. This thinking led us to turn a youth theatre into a club, reducing the performance anxiety some children felt.

Agency means having a real say in your participation and knowing that your choices can change what happens next.

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Play

Play is where the work begins to take shape.

Once people have found their space, we are paying attention to their bodies, and they have agency over how they participate, we can create the conditions for play.

We play games that get the body moving and build a shared language for devising. Sessions are playful
because we want to catch the imagination when nobody is trying to get it right. Play gives us somewhere to go without already knowing where we're going. Artists observe, document, and respond - building the next step from what the group discovers.

 

Snowed In changed direction because the group consistently played a female hero, so we shelved the original story to better reflect that. The work developed through what the participants found interesting, funny, exciting, or worth returning to.

Play isn't an extra layer we add to theatre. It's how the theatre gets made.

None of this is fast. But it's what 20 years of learning how to hold the complexity of people looks like.

Space makes participation possible.

Body tells us what is happening.

Agency gives people choice.

Play gives us somewhere to go.

 

And once a group is playing, they're already making the art.

Into the Forest became a forest because children played their way there. Snowed In was staged in a
church big enough to hold it so the audience could sit, stand, lie down, or retreat, because the piece was
designed to be experienced through different sensory systems.

We follow what happens rather than forcing it back towards what we thought it would be. That's
why our way of making theatre keeps changing shape.

The idea returns changed. That's the art.

As storytellers, we're developing our evaluation methods inspired by "Most Significant Change" - starting with how our current thread bounces through Space, the first of our four principles. We’ll be sharing our learning Substack from November 2026 to mark 20 years of Bounce.