Our Philosophy

Our philosophy is not complex, simply built on the idea of living and working with marginal peoples to share their stories, play together, eat together, and create theatre……. Makhampom has developed praxis more than methodology and philosophy, but with recent attempts to define our work, we offer this more academic interpretation. So here is Makhampom, in words.

Our Vision, Our Mission,  
Our Objectives, Our Praxis

Our Vision: looking to tomorrow today…..

……..for a Thai society where all peoples have access to their own community media to express their struggles and aspirations, and where theatre is a popular, effective living cultural practice.

Our Mission: get on your bike

……….to apply Theatre for Community Cultural Development (TCCD) for the progressive transformation of Thai society and for collaboration and exchange beyond borders.

Our Objectives: what was it we were meant to be doing

1.     to produce theatre as a micro media form

2.    to facilitate communities in the creation of their own media

3.    to create connections between communities and sectors of society through the medium of theatre

4.    to develop a community of TCCD workers in Thailand and beyond

Our Praxis: doing the dirty work

After years of floating between the terms community theatre, theatre for development, popular theatre, folk theatre, educational theatre, entertainment education and peoples theatre, we have coined the term theatre for community cultural development (TCCD). It is a bit of a mouthful but we think it serves the purpose of defining our work. In the simplest sense, theatre is our tool and community, culture and development are the fundamentals themes in its application. The term TCCD also represents a fusion of the theatre for development and community culture schools of practice.

Theatre for development is defined by Dale Byam as based on the aim “to encourage the spectator in an analysis of the social environment through dialogue”. Paolo Freire’s liberation pedagogy provides a conceptual grounding for the process orientation of theatre for development, where participation, dialogue, consciousness, and action are dominant features of the praxis. The community culture (wathanatham chumchon) school of thought was devised by Thai NGO activists in the 1970s, representing a new Thai ideological tradition. As a collection of various theoretical philosophies and methodological practices, this school of thought is broadly based on the principle of popular democracy framed within indigenous Thai cultural traditions, such as communal organization, folk wisdom, sustainable ecologies and Buddhist philosophy.   

For Makhampom, the love of theatre and the identification with the folk (chao baan) is the manifestation of this. The group initially saw itself as a ‘performance resource’, as artist and facilitator in the practice of theatre within the community and as a conduit between urban and rural centres for transferring the different stories, struggles and situations. However, Makhampom seeks, with time, to become obsolete within communities as they are resourced to perform and manage their own theatre media, leaving Makhampom as friend rather than facilitator.

Despite these theoretical definitions, Makhampom’s TCCD praxis has largely evolved over time, through lessons of experience. The value of theatre as a form of micro media has been a constant, however, this experience has shaped the methodology and approach to theatre as an art-form. In particular, the concept of participation became to be seen as futile when the theatre processes and techniques, based on Western-inspired modern theatre and Christian humanist traditions, were perceived as foreign and culturally distant. Consequently, the study of the local context became a fundamental in Makhampom’s work, such that Makhampom’s pedagogical work, was grounded in local forms of performance, social play, and communication in the name of culture and efficacy.

At one level, this process has been about the negotiation of the clash and/or assimilation of the modern and the traditional. In its community praxis and in its own performance work, the contemporary interpretation of Thai performance traditions, whether folk, popular, or classical, has become a strong theme for Makhampom. This is partly motivated by the principle of sustaining traditional performance practices for social and cultural identity and function, which can be described by the concept of communitas. However it is also driven by the principle of efficacy, namely, communicating most effectively with the audience/community, typically a popular approach to theatre. The context of the audience/community therefore becomes critical in defining the appropriate performance language, ie. style and form. For Makhampom, this theatre of context should support the idea of a living theatre, at the nexus of art and social function.

Makhampom’s weaknesses have been evident in the tendency to live in the immediate, almost in the tradition of farming from harvest to harvest, becoming project to project in the TCCD sense. As a result, Makhampom has maintained an economy of survival, based on a dependence on funding agencies. An attempt is now being made to reverse this such that the group is largely independent and sustainable. At the heart of this is a shift from dependency on funding bodies to people to people or group to group relationships. International solidarity, interculturalism, and economies of scale are the basis of Makhampom’s financial strategy, whereby support occurs largely through exchange.

Ironically, Makhampom has rarely been interested in theoretical research and discourse, but its history of practice reflects a praxis that provides a level of philosophical tradition in itself.

Or something like that………...