The Gobyerno Project was spearheaded by Manila-based contemporary performance company, Sipat Lawin Ensemble. The core team includes collaborators composed of theater-makers and educators, a filmmaker, and a visual artist from the Philippines, Australia, and the US.

Since then, the team has also collaborated with educators, community leaders, and students through performances in the Philippines and overseas-Australia, Korea, and Japan, and with audiences from South & Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe.

Gobyerno means “government” in the Filipino language. The Gobyerno Project is an interactive performance and participatory filmmaking workshop where audience-participants create their ideal government, redesign cities, and communities, and propose new governmental policies and laws. The work employs the languages of theater, cinema, and gamification to activate audience agency as an opportunity to question and exercise global citizenship.

We conceived the idea of Gobyero Project with the idea of embodying people's imaginations of a better society.

First prototyped in 2015, the Gobyerno Project is envisioned as a 6-year global project, taking different forms in several countries and contexts at different scales, from small two-hour workshops to a possibility of a full day durational version exploring performance as rehearsals for revolution and collective action. The Gobyerno Project brings together conversation, participatory theatre, and film to invite people to imagine and then manifest their own ideal government and communities.