“A new space of possibilities”: the Origins of Dacapo Theatre

In the present paper we tell the story of Dacapo Theatre, a Danish organisational theatre ensemble that pioneered the domain of theatre in organisations. We will focus on the early years of this journey. The objective of this article is to analyse the stories of three founding members and one early member of Dacapo Theatre in terms of “embodied cognition” (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 2016; Varela, 1992), of Theory U (Scharmer, 2016; Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski & Flowers, 2004), of “theatre as research” (Chemi et al., 2015), and “gatekeeper” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Even though this paper does not overall set out to generalise its conclusions because of its case study character, it aims to contribute creatively to contemporary workplaces. After briefly summarising the stories we heard in the interviews with Dacapo Theatre’s former members, we discuss their theoretical and practical implication in the sections that follow.