A backcasting workshop is basically “future-making” theatre without the costumes: you collectively *stage* a desirable future, then interrogate the plot mechanics that would have had to happen to get there, and finally you come back to the present with commitments. The closest participatory theatre forms are the ones that: 1. Put people in roles 1. Let them rehearse alternatives, and 1. Turn scenes into decisions.
Here are the best matches.
- Future Theatre and Futures Literacy style workshops. There’s a genre of “futures theatre” that explicitly blends futures studies methods with performance and audience participation. These often include the same moves: future scene, artefacts-from-the-future, headlines, then backtracking to causal steps.
- Legislative Theatre. This is basically backcasting with teeth. You stage situations that reveal structural barriers, then the group co-designs concrete proposals (rules, policies, institutional changes) that would make the preferred future possible. It maps well onto “Step C creative solutions” and “Step D prioritisation”, because the output is meant to become actionable guidance rather than just insight.
- Forum Theatre. Forum Theatre (Boal) is close because you start with a scene of a problem world, then the audience becomes “spect-actors” who step in to try different interventions. If you flip it into a “success-world” scene first, it becomes almost identical to backcasting: show the future scene, then replay earlier scenes where the key turning points were won or lost.
- Theatre of the Oppressed. Beyond Forum and Legislative, the broader ToTO toolkit is a good match because it treats theatre as rehearsal for reality. Backcasting is also rehearsal, but for systems change: you rehearse the future, then rehearse the pathway.
- Image Theatre. Image Theatre uses bodies and tableaux rather than dialogue: create a “now” image, create a “desired future” image, then build the sequence of intermediate images that transform one into the other. That intermediate sequence is a physical, embodied version of the backcasting timeline.
- Playback Theatre. Playback is close when you use it to surface lived experience and “invisible practice” during the inventory and baseline stages. The stories become shared evidence, and you can then pivot into backcasting by replaying the story from a future where it went well, and asking what supports and decisions made the difference.
- Process Drama. Process Drama is sustained role-play where the group inhabits a world over time. If your workshop runs longer than a single session, process drama is a natural container for multi-step backcasting: you can “live” the future institution, then jump backwards in time across sessions to negotiate the enabling conditions.
- Scenario Improvisation. Many applied theatre groups run improvised “future scenarios” with role cards (minister, funder, journalist, community organiser, etc.). If you add a structured step-back timeline after each improv, you’ve effectively built a backcasting engine.
If you want a simple pattern that’s almost a 1:1 mapping to a backcasting workshop: * Future Scene (success-world, 2035). * Museum of the Future (props, artefacts, “labels” explaining what changed). * Newsroom Retrospective (headlines at 2032, 2029, 2026). * Turning-Point Replay (Forum-style interventions at the hardest moments). * Commitments (who does what next, and what enabling support is needed).