Facilitation as Performance: Breaking Through the Fourth Wall to Ignite Change
Don't mistake me for a bossy person simply because both my career and my passion work involves me telling people what to do—and how to be. By day, I am the Director of Facilitation and Leadership at UBUNTU Research and Evaluation, and by night (or whenever creativity strikes), I am a playwright and director. I’ve had a busy year.
In and out of Milwaukee, virtual and in-person, I have led organizational retreats, presented learning series, hosted listening sessions and led discussions on various topics related to dignity, equity, and transformative accountability. Along with that work, I was able to exercise a creative dream by directing “for Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf” for the Milwaukee Black Theater Festival—a production that profoundly inspired me to draw connections between my career in facilitation and my passion for theater. Both, directorships, provide the opportunity, if done with intention, to empower people as well as change minds.
At first glance, facilitation and performance might seem worlds apart. Facilitation is often made synonymous with presentation—a static, one-sided monologue where information flows from the facilitator to the audience without much interaction. Even if as a facilitator you are pondering the quintessential question of whether “To be or not to be”, I would caution you that no one comes to a workshop or a meeting to be witness to a two hour soliloquy. There are AI generated learning modules that do that. Instead, I’d argue that effective facilitation is much closer to an interactive performance. And very much like my production of “for colored girls,” facilitation should inspire, encourage, and challenge participants to think differently, to feel deeply, and—most importantly—to act.
As a facilitator, my role is not just to convey knowledge but to create movement. This movement is both metaphorical and literal: inspiring organizations to transform mindsets, adopt new practices, and shift paradigms. In this way, facilitation, like theater, breaks through the "fourth wall"—the invisible barrier between the performer and the audience. From start to finish, participants should feel like they are on a journey with you. Moreover, where participants' mindset begins is not where it should end. Allow the measure of your success as a facilitator to be the number of times you hear someone say, “Wow. I never thought of it that way before” or even cause them to question, “Why did no one ever teach me this in school?” In my case, my co-workers love to tease, “Linetta is going to make someone cry.” And do. Tears are definitely qualitative data!
Breaking the fourth wall in facilitation might start with something as simple as eye contact. Eye contact establishes connection and engagement, signaling to participants that their presence matters. But it’s more than that: eye contact allows the facilitator to gauge where attention lies.
Are participants looking at me? Are they engaging with the work or with one another? These observations inform my ability to adapt, to pivot, to pull participants into the “performance” of the facilitation. Is there a constant stream of people getting up to go to the bathroom? Is someone scrolling on their mobile device? Does no one respond to your questions? Facilitators should be paying attention to everything that everyone is doing in that room. In a facilitator training session, I told learners that as facilitators they should think of themselves as deejays. Per my favorite uncle who has been a deejay for over thirty years, eye contact, heads nodding, feet tapping, people getting out on the dance floor to move their bodies is all data that he uses to let him know if he has connected to his target audience or if he should change the song. As a facilitator, how do you know if it’s time to change your tune?
“I’m just here so I won’t get fined.” Facilitating to a room full of Marshawn Lynches, in other words, a captive audience can be a daunting task. I mean, I can only imagine cuz I don’t have those problems. Truly engaging facilitation is just that. It’s engaging. Beyond eye contact, facilitation transforms when it brings the audience onto the stage—when participants become active collaborators rather than a captive audience. This is where the magic happens. It’s not about transferring knowledge; it’s about co-creating understanding, manifesting a room full of opportunities to create a fair and equal exchange of ideas and solutions between the facilitator and the audience. Whether through storytelling, interactive activities, or deep dialogue, facilitation as performance invites participants to imagine and embody change.
In both theater and facilitation, the goal is to ignite transformation.
Social justice is usually followed by the word “movement” for that reason. While the theater uses stories rooted in historical or social context and exhibition to be a catalyst for connection and reflection, facilitation, ideally also grounded in the historical and social context of an issue, creates partnerships in order to engage in trust filled and radically open dialogue and practice that shift individual and collective behaviors. Both rely on the art of engagement, where the audience doesn’t sit passively absorbing information as observer only but takes the stage to become an actor in the new developing narrative. Having a flair for the dramatic, I favor the latter. It’s much more compelling.
“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players;”
(from As You Like It, William Shakespeare)
So, the next time you step into a facilitation space, consider your role as mere presenter of fact or information. Imagine first how you can approach it as a performance. How will you keep all eyes on you? How will you direct your participants to think, act, and move as your work intends? How will you break the fourth wall to inspire movement and thus action? After all, facilitation is an invitation to direct your audience to become key players with you, co-creating the change you imagined and that they, too, desire to realize.