Act Your Age! Youth Leadership in Art and Activism

Act Your Age!: Youth Leadership in Art and Activism

Partners: Common/Wealth theatre (Bradford, England & Cardiff, Wales) and FUNDUS THEATER / Theatre of Research (Hamburg)

Image © COMMON WEALTH Take Your Place, Gavin Porter

"FUNDUS THEATER | Forschungstheater (Theatre of Research) and Common/Wealth are excited to come together to explore the involvement of teenagers in arts and activism and how it can inform youth leadership. Theatre of Research will hold workshops in Hamburg with Theaterberater:innen, a group of young people with migration backgrounds who advise Fundus Theater on anti-racist programming. They will then share these experiences online with young people from Cardiff, ahead of Common/Wealth welcoming a cohort from Theaterberater:innen to Cardiff in July 2025.

Common/Wealth will facilitate a collaboration between the Theaterberater:innen and young leaders from working-class communities of Cardiff. The cohort will share their experiences with art and activism, and research the role that young people have played in social arts practice since the 1960s. We are excited to be joined by Professor Heike Roms from the University of Exeter, a practitioner/researcher on child art and activism based in Cardiff and Hamburg, and two artist-facilitators: Alex Owusu (Hamburg) and Fahadi Mukulu (Cardiff). By empowering teenagers as co-leaders and collaborators, we aim to challenge traditional hierarchies in arts and activism. Our project will reveal young people’s crucial contributions to these fields, examine why these contributions are so little celebrated, and explore how they offer young people today models with which to address their experiences of systemic racism and anti-Blackness, and economic injustice."

Common/Wealth theatre and FUNDUS THEATER / Theatre of Research

About the partners

FUNDUS THEATER | Forschungstheater (Theatre of Research) (FT) is a theatre for young audiences in Hamburg. FT produces performances and projects for children and young people from 3 to 14 years of age, often in cooperation with kindergartens and schools. With about 200 events per year we reach an audience of about 10,000 kids and adults. Since 1980, FUNDUS THEATER has been transporting its audiences to a paradise of signs, where image and language, gesture and material, movement and sound stand side by side on an equal footing. In 2003, Forschungstheater (Theatre of Research) emerged from this tradition as a laboratory dedicated to intergenerational research between childhood, art and science. The theatre becomes a forum in which we can experiment with how we want to live together now and in the future - from kindergarten to graduate school, from the neighbourhood to the universe.

Common/Wealth is a political theatre company based in Bradford, England and Cardiff, Wales. Our aim is to promote wellbeing and social inclusion through the performing arts, with a focus on people from working class backgrounds: as collaborators, performers, participants and audiences. We make site-specific theatre and other public projects that encompass devised performance, new writing, visual design and verbatim. Our work is political and contemporary – high-quality, relevant, artistic work addressing concerns of our times. Our ideas are rooted in socialist politics, working-class backgrounds, contemporary theatre, art and design, the people that we meet, and a radical ambition to shift things. We often co-create our work with local people and present it in the heart of communities: a residential house, a boxing gym, a car park - places where people who might not go to the theatre might come to. Our work and reach is hyper-local, national and international.