TO celebrate the Year of Young People, every week in 2018 The National is giving a platform to young Scots. This week, 20-year-old Craig McCorquodale.

I HAVE recently remembered that I am young. In March, I turned 20 and stepped away from being a teenager after years of feeling much older than I ever was. I’ve always had older friends, always wanted the adults’ food at family parties, and always wanted to look through interior design catalogues rather than play football with the other boys.

In many ways, I’ve grown up always wanting to be a bit older – occasionally lying about my age to people I’d meet for the first time. It’s only now, at 20 years old, that I’ve arrived at a real sense of contentment and pride at being young. But this reluctance to claim an identity as a young person is quite common, especially among older teenagers and people between the ages of 20 and 25.

Despite the huge shifts young people are inspiring across global political movements, it seems that to be young in society is still aligned with disempowerment, powerlessness and general not knowing. This is a narrative fed to us in school, where we are trained to be consumers and tested by the retaining and recalling of information, which prepares us for passivity and upholds structures of capitalist patriarchy.

Young people today have grown up in an image-saturated culture pushed by commercial media, and this means we are constantly told to remain absent. We are specifically targeted by TV programmes like Geordie Shore, which creates a political apathy that in turn allows for preservation of the status quo. This is a system of domination convenient to the Tory government, who desperately want to maintain the rhetoric that young people are disengaged.

As an artist working with other young people in different contexts, I therefore believe the making of autobiographical performance can offer an alternative vision of the times we are living in. I saw this every Wednesday night for over a year when I was Associate Artist at Junction 25, a young people’s performance collective in residence at Tramway. Together, we interrogated what in the world felt most alive for us, we danced off a hard day, and we set objects on fire in a performance.

Earlier this year, I brought 60 bricks into a primary school in Govanhill and made a performance about “home” in collaboration with a P6 class. We stood on the tables, threw bricks on the floor and built wobbly structures in their classroom, and this immediately disrupted their usual patterns of learning, and, even for a moment, activated a small change.

In this vein, I’d like to move away from the culture of overprotection that surrounds life as a young person, and towards a pedagogy where risk is an active part of any learning experience. Risk is, in fact, a cornerstone of what it means to be young.

Art is a place to take risks – to transgress the prescribed rules of what a young person can do. It’s a place to challenge or experiment or provoke. So come on, young people! In a political landscape on the brink of collapse, we are present and ready to throw our bodies against the gears and upon the wheels of power.

Craig McCorquodale is a young performance maker and live artist from Glasgow, in the second year of the BA (Hons) Contemporary Performance Practice programme at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He is currently making a new show with 21Common, A Body of Movement and Other Stories of Passion – a meditation on power, personal resistance and pop music, which will be presented in the Chandler Studio Theatre on May 31 and June 1. Tickets available here.