Towards Youth: Youth Civic Engagement and Theatre - Drama Research

Towards Youth: Youth Civic Engagement and Theatre

What happens when researchers and community partners collaborate to platform stories, voices, and issues that matter?

Background

Project: Humanity is a non-profit, Toronto-based theatre company focused on creating original and innovative socially-minded audience experiences through the arts. Their commitment to joining and advancing community conversations on issues of social importance has resulted in award-winning plays and social interventions.

Playwright Andrew Kushnir wrote and directed Towards Youth, a play constructed entirely from interviews and classroom footage captured by our research team. The play helps audiences better understand the struggles and ingenuity of young people in vastly different geopolitical sites, and further, how the adult world could turn differently towards youth; how our very democracy depends upon our capacity to think relationally and to engage civically in this increasingly politically polarized moment.

I felt challenged in a really great way, and the idea of receiving and attending, listening, hearing.

Audience member - Towards Youth

As Project:Humanity (PH) takes significant steps in their development, research demonstrating the social impacts of their work is crucial. The world premiere of Towards Youth presented an opportunity to explore the way audience members are affected by forms of theatre that enable us to 'visit' the stories and experiences of others.

...it does leave me with hope, but I think it will take a lot...

Audience member - Towards Youth

Through a combination of school-based drama workshops facilitated by PH, and live interviews with students and audience members, this research considers how youth view drama workshops as capacity-building, what they might learn about global relationships through the stories of distant 'others', and what this means for their own sense of civic engagement.