“The Numbers”: Where Theatre Meets Data to Repair a Broken World
In Civic Data Theatre, community stakeholders collaborate with trained participatory theatre artists to examine, interpret, and create new information about a pressing local issue. Together, they translate quantitative data—a central language of government decision-making—into gestures, narratives, and moments of embodied performance.
Northeastern’s Data Theatre Collaborative, led by Prof. Dani Snyder-Young, and co-designed by a multidisciplinary team including Policy School Prof. Moira Zellner, staged several performances of “The Numbers” in November 2025.
Civic Data Theatre, an initiative of the Data Theatre Collaborative, develops a humanities-centered set of tools and methods for scholars, community organizers, and government to facilitate democratic participation in local municipal projects. It reimagines how community meetings and data-informed democracies work, making government decision-making accessible to people who might otherwise be excluded from or alienated by it.
“The Numbers,” an original theatre piece developed by the Data Theatre Collaborative with support from the Mellon Foundation, examines the many ways we interact with data in our lives, how it reflects the things we know and fear, how it can be a tool for us to help repair a broken world, and how it can be manipulated whether or not we are paying attention.
The performance experimented with creative forms of audience deliberation, and portions of it were designed in collaboration with the City of Boston’s Office of the Environment to feed community wisdom into the city’s climate action plan.