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L'Ouverture Mobile Theatre


The brief to provide a combined teaching/staging unit together with a seating unit for performances – all of which could be delivered on the back of a lorry and erected within 24 hours – was solved through a mixture of research and innovative design.

Established in 1975, L'Ouverture exists to create opportunities to learn about the arts through active participation. At the time, their current focus was on work within Primary Schools where they provided the opportunity to become involved in a broad range of activities encompassing creative writing, art, and design technology (computers, lighting and sound) performance arts, publicity, marketing and management.

Our feasibility study set out to consider the opportunities through architecture to increase L'Ouverture's profile and activity within the community at large, and establish a design brief and develop a concept proposal to be used for fund-raising. The resulting proposal consists of two elements, a teaching/staging unit and a seating unit, each deliverable in small-scale components to deal with the restrictions of small school sites. The teaching unit was conceived to be autonomous. It comes to life when the seating unit is plugged into it and it becomes the stage or generator of the performance.

Considerable interest has been generated by the proposal. Alternative uses are being investigated using a similar technology such as mobile conference facilities and temporary sports facilities. When funding was granted it was used instead to establish a fixed base at Trinity Buoy Wharf in East London.