Cardboard Citizens is the UK's only homeless people's professional theatre company and the leading practitioner of Forum Theatre in the UK. They work with people who have experience of, or who are at risk of, becoming homeless.

Cardboard Citizens was founded in 1991 by Adrian Jackson

Adrian Jackson (Cardboard Citizens)

Adrian Jackson is the founder-director and chief executive of a unique theatre company, Cardboard Citizens, in which most the performers and many other employees are homeless and ex-homeless people, refugees or asylum-seekers...

, as a London Bubble project. For the first four years it toured Forum Theatre by homeless people to other homeless people throughout the UK, performing in hostels, day centres, arches, the street and conference centres.

After Cardboard Citizens became an independent entity in 1995, the company broadened out into schools touring, as well as regular workshops, theatre

Theatre

Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...

 visits, and large-scale site-specific

Site-specific

Site-specific is used in a range of contexts:In art Site-specific artIn molecular biology Site-specific recombination...

 collaborations. It is now a recognised contributor to the London theatre scene, providing opportunities for cultural explorations to homeless people - all without compromising its integrity and its allegiance to the oppressed

Oppression

Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner. It can also be defined as an act or instance of oppressing, the state of being oppressed, and the feeling of being heavily burdened, mentally or physically, by troubles, adverse conditions, and...

.