OPENING on September 28 with a special event in Glasgow is Futureproof, “a nationwide, international festival of radical new work created with young people and for everyone”.
Supported by the Year of Young People and presented by the National Theatre of Scotland, Futureproof brings together some of the world’s most respected theatre-makers with 10 groups of young people in communities from South Ayrshire to Unst, the most northerly of the inhabited Shetland Isles.
Performances include an unusual tour of Paisley, a staged radio show exploring what it means to be a young person in Scotland, a piece on Aberdeen beach inspired by the inventions of Alexander Bell and a series of performances made in collaboration with young men at Polmont Young Offenders Institution.
Working side by side with Scottish artists and communities of young people are 10 groups of acclaimed artists from the UK and beyond, including AKHE from Russia, Australia’s Back To Back, Rimini Protokoll from Berlin and Canada’s Mammalian Diving Reflex.
The latter have worked with young people from Shetland on The World Is A Wedding, a piece inspired by the work of Erving Goffman, a Canadian sociologist who studied the people of Unst in 1948.
“All of these companies have been looking for young people who are least likely to traditionally participate in these activities,” says Lucy Gaizely, Futureproof’s co-curator. “It’s the complete antithesis of that audition, youth theatre-kind-of-thing.”
Each of the projects will present work unique to the young people involved and the areas where they live, some of which were specifically identified as places where there is less visible cultural activity for young people to engage with.
“The young people in Shetland are like young people everywhere,” says Gaizely, who is part of art-activist collective 21Common. “But by the sheer nature of where they are located in the world they are geographically isolated from youth culture, from cultural activity, which is so far away.
“By engaging with a company from Canada they are one step closer to having a more global sense of what it can mean to be an artist.”
Gaizely adds: “Human beings everywhere are very creative but living in a small community can present challenges. For the young people from Shetland, they have a very big decision to make as to whether they are going to stay in their community and work to the benefit of that community, or do they leave to go to university elsewhere and potentially never return?
“These opportunities could potentially feed in to a sense of cultural capital for these young people; that potentially they say: ‘I want to stay in Unst and I want Unst to look a little bit more like this – and I would have input into making that happen.’”
Working with people of all ages who may be marginalised is a key value of 21Common, whose numbers included the highly acclaimed performance artist Adrian Howells who died in 2014.
“If we don’t engage with those voices, we are just talking to the mirror, the echo chamber,” says Gaizely. “This is why one of these projects is with young people who are incarcerated. That is a fact of their lives. It’s as if their viewpoints and their opinions don’t count.
“It’s important that we understand the society we live in and we all take a collective responsibility for why these young people are incarcerated in the first place.”
Gaizely says the simple act of calling a person “an artist” can be empowering.
“Futureproof put out the call, inviting young artists to take part, and that’s the language that we use,” she says. “One minute you’re 13 and you’re having trouble at school and you’re bullied and your parents don’t get what you’re trying to do and the next minute you’re working with another artist making something. That simple bit of language can be transformative.”
www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/production/futureproof
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