AUTH Team member: Myrto Pigkou-Repousi, Assistant Professor of Theatre in Education, School of Drama
September 2019 – June 2023
Research Team:
Kathleen Gallagher (Coordinator)
Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Distinguished Professor in the department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, cross-appointed to the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto.
Andrew Kushnir (Playwright, Actor, Artistic Director of Project: Humanity, Canada), Jorge Arcila (theatre director, researcher and higher education teacher, Columbia), Wang Jung-Wang (Professor of Acting and Oral History Performance, National University of Tainan, Taiwan), Rachel King (Assistant Professor in Creativity, Performance and Education, University of Warwick, United Kingdom), Μyrto Pigkou-Repousi (Assistant Professor of Theatre in Education, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece), Urvashi Sahni (Dr., Founder and Chief of Prena Girls School, India).
This project investigates the ways in which different genres of postdramatic theatre and performance can contribute to young people’s active participation in the public spaces in which they live around the world. Emphasis is given on the communication among the groups of the different countries and on the sharing of the artistic work of the young participants which is presented through digital technologies and communication networks.
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This intercultural project takes place in six countries around the world: Toronto (Canada), Coventry (United Kingdom), Kaohsiung (Taiwan), Lucknow (India), Thessaloniki (Greece). The research – realized through drama workshops – uses practices of Verbatim Theatre, Devised Theatre and Site-Specific Performance in order to reinforce young people’s relationship with their socio-environmental context and to foster their sense of belonging in wider cultural and social contexts. One of the principal aims of this project is to reveal the interdependence of environmental, social and cultural issues in an era of ecologic and socio-political crisis through the participatory and experienced learning process that is created in the process of theatre making. Another core aim relates to the communication between the youth of the different continents and the creation of cultural, education and artistic bridges among them.
RationalThe previous research of the same team (in Youth, Theatre, Radical Hope and the Ethical Imaginary) revealed profound connections between the practice of drama in the classroom and the capacity of youth to develop ‘care’ by learning in relation to one another, in intellectual and embodied ways. The theatrical creation was revealed as an important method for the development of skills of collaboration, solidarity, trust and empathy.
As a following step, the current project orients this ethics of care to the environmental-social nexus in order to help participants understand the mutual imbrication of the environment society and culture and encourage them to imagine radical changes on the ways in which they perceive and act publicly at a time of ecological and socio-political polarization.
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a) To explore global questions of environmental and ecological degradation along with social and political polarization using hybrid genres of drama, performance, and digital media, to encourage an interdisciplinary conversation with young people about the nature of intersecting global crises.
b) To examine and extend the possibilities of a global ethics of care, as part of a framework for global citizenship through young people’ digital-live theatre productions.
c) To advance new interdisciplinary methods for application in curricula and pedagogy in drama, media studies, and across the arts, through convergences of the digital and the live, the social and the ecological, and the local and the global -
The research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and by national funds from the countries that participate.
For more information, visit the official website of the research: https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/dr/global-youth-digital-citizen-artists/
