Leaning in with Theatre: Global Youth Holding Space for an Imagined Tomorrow

Youth, Theatre, Radical Hope and the Ethical Imaginary (2014-2019), uses a socially-engaged, collaborative model of research to examine how theatre can become a forum for the creative exploration of civic engagement- who am I, relative to others, and what compels me to act upon my world. The mixed methods ethnography, and the cycle of plays which has been created from it, offer a theoretically rich and empirically grounded account of the ways in which the concepts of hope and care function in the lives of young people today and in turn how participation in artistic practices and local-global social relations provoke forms of engaged citizenship worth considering in times of increasing youth social unrest.

The five sites offer very particular micro-ecologies with distinct aspects of sociopolitical unrest: i) Lowest caste girls in Lucknow (India) learning how to transgress the gendered limits imposed on them; ii) disenfranchised youth in Coventry (England) creating a counter-narrative to Brexit; iii) young people in Tainan (Taiwan) seeking to marry tradition with modernity; iv) youth in Athens (Greece), searching for ways to thrive within economic and refugee crises and; v) Toronto (Canada) youth making sense of their imagined futures in a rapidly gentrifying and socio-economically polarized city. Using Hannah Arendt's (1979) 'thinking without a banister', we employ storytelling through theatre as a way to think the present moment otherwise.

Now four years into the study, this paper will offer a set of early findings on how the affective intimacies of applied theatre mobilize civic engagement, youth activism, and work across differences of social location; how youth in diverse urban spaces offer a barometric check on our thinning global democracies; and how arts-based methodologies can begin to respond to Appiah’s (2006, p. xxi) central question: “What do we owe strangers by virtue of our shared humanity?”