Theatre Itself or the Theatre for the Audience: The Problem of Taking Part in the Participatory Performance

This article focuses on the problem of participation in socially engaged or participatory theatre projects. The purpose of the participatory projects is to provide the audience’s in- volvement both in the process and in the result. The process of creating participatory art is always complicated and non-completed at the same time. So the author of the article analyzes such important components as equality, representation of the oppressed or ex- cluded people voices. One of the most important agenda for such a project is the idea of inclusion — ‘nothing about us without us’. The problem of participation is described from different points of view and combines aesthetical, ethical and political positions. The con- clusion drawn by the author is that participation becomes one of the important categories not only for social theatre, if we define it separately, but for contemporary dramatic art itself. Participating as a process is always under the influence of different circumstances as inside of the project and outside, which is connected with the political and social climate. So we should include in our research many fields of the social sciences besides art but keeping art (theatre in our case) as the main issue.