Uniquely Claque

In 1978 Claque Theatre founded the concept of the community play and for the past twenty five years have developed a unique working practice which engages professionals with communities to create high quality theatre that is respected and emulated world wide. Many of our values and working methods are transferable into fundamental business practice. We do not offer a system to be implemented more a philosophy to be practiced. In our experience people need to be committed to more than just the programme of the month. Our focus is not on getting more out of people but being committed to having more fun, being happier, enjoying doing what you're doing for others. It's about a better working culture. The consequence is, of course, people do give more.
Our teams of professional theatre practitioners are selected not only for their creative talents but their ability and willingness to make certain choices about the way they work. The notion of working with skilled theatre practitioners is what first motivates the hundreds of people to participate in our ambitious projects, but it is their choice of working practice that sustains the community's interest and allegiance.
When Claque Theatre works with a community it encourages that community to take ownership of the project. With the company's help and guidance the community administrates the finances, marketing and management of the project; they work alongside professional artists in researching, finding and creating the script, constructing the sets, making the costumes, stage managing the event and of course performing. It demands the development of a whole range of creative and managerial skills. The idea is that when the play projects are over the community has improved its ability to capitalise on the newfound energy the play has provoked. In nearly every case the projects have proved that the collective experience of developing appropriate skills and adopting a healthy working ethos give the communities a better chance of successfully managing cultural activities in the future.

Claque's Transferable Skills, Principles and Techniques.

We believe the principles, skills and techniques needed for our work to flourish are essential to any creative working environment. These include:

• Creative Team Thinking
• Social Interaction
• Creative Brainstorming Techniques
• Build Trust
• Ownership
• Take Risks
• Play
• Making others look good
• Being There
• Role Playing
• Playing an Attitude
• The Power and use of Questions

Creative Team Thinking
Yes creativity can be learnt. It is possible to turn unimaginative people into imaginative people very quickly. Everyone has the potential to be creative. Most unimaginative people were persuaded or convinced themselves they were 'dull' by the time they were ten years old. Drawing is a good example - most of us draw like ten year olds, we are stuck artistically at the level of children. This creativity is not missing it is simply lying dormant. There are specific exercises and improvisation techniques that unlock the creativity we hold within ourselves, and there are others that develop our creative thinking as part of a team. Theatre and social based 'games' can expand our ability to engage in a dreamtime and combat the blocking of ideas by accepting and building on them. The challenge with creativity is not finding ideas, (these exercises will prove an abundance of ideas) but taking them forward. Discover how ideas work when they become common property. Find the value in letting go and how to select the most appropriate idea by discovering a common ground. Workshops in creative thinking can help teams work more co-operatively and imaginatively together with generosity and sense of fun.

Social Interaction
The key essentials to creating purposeful drama are the assessment of character, relationships, situations and motivation and an understanding of status and body language. The procedures we use to analyse drama are connected to normal behaviour. Understanding social interaction is theatre's bread and butter.

Having an understanding of our physicality, body language and its relationship to status is essential to creating good relationships with people. People form an immediate opinion of you within the first ten seconds of meeting and 90% of what becomes a fairly held opinion within the first ninety seconds. 60-70% of what we communicate to others is physical gesture and posture, and only 30% is by word. If we sense someone is lying it is more likely because of what they are doing than what they are saying. We can offer workshops that introduce you to the vital role body language plays in our social interaction and give you a good working appreciation to help you read people and understand your own communication better. The workshop can examine at a variety of general situations, selected by us or specific situations, selected by you. Learn to put people at ease through postural echo, and open gestures, the power of eye contact and personal space. Control the environment to create the desired effect for an interview, counselling session or to challenge someone's behaviour. Explore the pros and cons of different table and seating positions. Get a better understanding of why you react to certain people the way you do, and the effect you have on others. Perhaps most importantly learn the somatic value of gesture - our gestures express what we feel, but gesture can control how we feel. Adopting certain gesture can inspire an open, positive and creative attitude.

No interaction between people is without motive. Wherever two people are there is a transaction of status. Social interaction workshops train people to see status and become status experts in a range of situations. An understanding of status is a tool to stronger leadership, it helps you deal with situations of conflict, enables you to maintain discipline while remaining human and approachable and it gives you skills to educe creative, positive thinking from others.

Creative Brainstorming Techniques
Managers and leaders spend a high percentage of their time in meetings. That's where ideas are shaped, embodied, owned, transmitted, validated or trashed. Yet meetings are legendary places of frustration and dissatisfaction.

Company meetings are often closed shop involving a mall select group of people who do not always have all the pieces that make up the 'full picture' of what they are discussing. We can show how to bring people together to achieve breakthrough intervention, empowerment, shared vision and collaborative action. Claque has used techniques to empower and help build more collaborative communities. Our approach is based on finding common ground and imagining better futures to improve planning. Our meeting techniques involve broader sections of stakeholders. They explore together the whole system. We try to bring into one room people who each have pieces of a complex puzzle. We need a shared view of what is going on in the world, our hopes for the future, what is going well for us, what is not, what we want to do about it and so forth.

Building Trust
You can get very little done without trust, yet many companies base their whole structure on competition which is the commonest enemy of trust. People need time and space to build trusting relationships together. Claque can offer workshops to enhance trust and improve working practice

Ownership
Theatre is the most collaborative of art forms. Many people from a whole range of disciplines have to work together to create a single image of the world. They can only do this if they understand and share the same vision, seek for common ground, give and take. The director's role is to draw these units into a cohesive single identity. This will not happen unless there is an understanding of collaborative ownership. If there is a vision it belongs to everyone. Once an idea is expressed it belongs to us all. It's not going to work if one person is the Boss all the time. When we accept the invitation to create a shared vision we accept two responsibilities - to teach and be teachable. The battle is in giving people the confidence to respect other people's experience. Leaders need to listen, employees need to have the confidence to come to the 'bosses' and say if they think something is wrong. These codes of behaviour are so often a problem because they are a challenge to our status. They are challenges that can feel like personal affronts. We believe, however it's a technique, a skill like driving a car, which can be learned.
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We all like to be part of a great enterprise and feel we've a hand in it, where our opinions matter. Start using others opinions and you'll become a better team. The return is tenfold when you make people matter. It's merely a question of learning how.

Taking Risks
Learning from experiences means taking risks. If you are afraid of anything that could be called failure you'll never do anything. Try something new if it doesn't work you don't have to be locked into it forever. Try short term - pilot something - it might work, it might not, but if its something that might improve the culture in which we work you may at least try. The worst that can happen is you don't do it again. Are you happy with the way things are? If you keep doing what you're doing will things get better or worse? Should you take personal responsibility to change your environment or should you just sit around and hope the answer will arrive on a silver platter?

Claque sees failure as part of the learning process to success. Try things, if it fails think, say 'How interesting' Rather than call it a failure. When you learn to juggle dropping the ball is part of the learning process as well.

Play
"Work made fun gets done." Play is not just an activity it's a state of mind that brings new energy to tasks in hand and sparks creative solutions. Life at work is part of a full life. How many work to have a life as opposed to making it part of life? We devalue life at work when we treat as something we have to pass through.

Claque can offer ideas to bring fun into the workplace but more importantly build the capacity for you to create fun ideas yourselves. Play and work mix. A liveable work environment in which people thrive needs a certain degree of playfulness.

Make others look good
The difference between the worlds of the professional actor and community actor is competition. A professional actor goes on stage to look good because their next job depends on it. It was a revelation to realise the community actor goes on stage to make everyone else look good and that it turns out to be a more practical and self-preserving policy. Either you are working for yourself to look good and everyone is working against that or you are working for the other hundred people all of whom are working for you. The product and individual who looks best is the one where everyone is there for everyone else.

One might regard these as areas to business success:

• Customer satisfaction
• Employee satisfaction
• Ability to generate profits
• Growing Market
• Continuous improvement

All five are necessary conditions for a good business, but if you had to pick only one, what is the most important? Many, I suppose would pick 3. Businesses exist to make profit. What if you focussed on customer satisfaction? Neither one is necessarily better or worse than the other. But choosing customer satisfaction puts you on another journey. You stop focussing on what you want for what other people want. It pays back. Yes you need to stay focussed on profit - but is it a cause or effect?

Claque offers creative exercises to explore different attitudes to work, doing what you don't need to do, making people's day by doing things for which you don't get paid. Making others look good is not just about being nice it's about going out of your way to do something. Invest in people most people will appreciate it. Some won't - that's Ok it can't be unconditional - it only takes a few people to make it work. It's then infectious.

Being There
The biggest threat to good working practice lies in the fact that spending time with people has been replaced by the need to spend more time monitoring technology. We have forgotten what its like to be in the present. We are all of the mindset that we will deal with our tasks before we help anyone. With technology we have more tasks to complete before we deal with people. Then we don't thank or acknowledge people because 'they are just doing their job'. Its magic when you meet people who give you their full attention. How much do you get done when you are in one place thinking about another place? Commit to being in one place at a time. When you are present - not dwelling on what may happen in the future, or worried about what happened in the past - you are fully attuned to opportunities that develop and to the needs of the people you encounter. You develop a healthier perspective and the capacity for greater focus and creativity.

Claque can offer workshops in 'attention' and develop the art of being there.

Role Play & Playing Attitudes
Role is a practical method to rehearse change, customer service and delivery, deal with different team dynamics, manage conflict, tackle bullying and harassment, equality and diversity, work and life balance. It is an invaluable tool in many aspects of business training in areas such as recruitment, interviewing, customer care and consultation. Role-play training is useful at all levels from senior Managers to front line staff. Role-play scenarios can be devised to help assess and tackle specific company issues.

Actors are people who have learned the technique of playing different characters; it is the very core of what they do. A character is simply playing an attitude. If you look for the worst you will find it everywhere so look for the best. You have the power to choose your responses. If you find yourself with an attitude that is not what you want it to be - pick a new one. The attitude you have right now is the one you are choosing. Is it the one you want? It's hard to choose a good attitude everyday but you can choose some type of attitude everyday. We are a product of our environment. If you've never been where anyone gives a damn you will become that way too. Here Claque can set up improvisations to try out playing different attitudes and test their responses.

The Power and Use of Questions
Leadership like good teaching is more a matter of educing positive responses and drawing the best from people than 'ordering' or 'telling'.
The questions you ask help people feel more involved in the work programmes. Good questioning can develop their sense of responsibility, pride and ownership in projects. Questions can also help you to assess the interest and ways individuals in a team identify with the chosen tasks. The questions you ask either help to develop commitment or destroy confidence, so an understanding of their power and use is essential to good management of people. There are numerous basic question types and knowing them is your greatest tool to lead people into and through work projects. This does not mean that leader never instructs or tells, though it's worth bearing in mind that questions have the ability to inform just as strongly as they have to enquire.

Bespoke Corporate Training for your Business

There are specific and tested techniques that can be put to use right away in any kind of business or organisation and any programme will have certain fundamental goals:

• Using the participants past experience as an aid to the future
• Seeking to recognise and appreciate existing personal abilities and potential
• Developing knowledge, skills and attitudes
• Increasing motivation and job satisfaction
• Enhance relationships and fostering team work

However, Claque's policy is to negotiate a programme, course or workshop with the client business. This allows us make an evaluation, plan and set objectives that meet their unique needs. Effective preparation is an essential part of successful training.