About the Community Program
Community Programs creates exciting new work drawn from young people’s real lived experiences. Our work provides powerful encounters between young people from a broad diversity of backgrounds, exploring the complex cultural heritage of the contemporary Australian context. Young people’s experiences, challenges and ideals form the springboard for creating live performance that is full of spirit, wide awake and rich with warmth and connection.
We make immediate theatre that grapples with the deeper themes that run through young people’s lives. Our work invites active audience involvement. This can take the form of audience input, placement of audiences in the centre of the experience we are depicting or improvisational theatre that brings audiences’ real life experiences to life on the spot. Our interactive theatrical journeys invite real encounters between audience members and performers and places equal value on the experience being offered and the voluntary participation of audience members.
We work across platforms that allow for real change within social contexts and individuals’ lives. Recent examples include facilitating dialogue between young people and police, empowering young people to offer cultural training to police, bringing young people and their elders together to gather oral histories as the foundation for a new work. Our work rests on building and maintaining real relationships over time. Young people in their teens working with emerging young artists in their early twenties, working with established artists of all ages all contribute to an active artistic community. Designing projects that extend over multi-year time frames supports the deepening of working relationships and artistic skills development, enabling us to support young people through multiple stages of their artistic growth, providing mentorship, training and professional development both within chosen artistic disciplines and in the larger project of establishing an artistic career. Our support extends to providing paid employment for emerging young artists, providing practical advice on their independent projects, offering student placements where possible and tailoring our responses to the individual needs our young artists articulate.
