Sites of possibility: applied theatre and digital storytelling with youth

Abstract

As a process for engaging marginalised voices in the social/cultural economy of the media, digital storytelling has garnered much attention from media artists, community organisers and scholars since the early 1990s. The practice of digital storytelling, or the making and sharing of personal narratives through recorded voice-overs, digital photography and video, music and/or digitally composed multi-media collages, parallels many aspects of applied drama/theatre; and yet, little scholarship exists around how digital storytelling can and does function as an intentionally facilitated, critical performance practice with young people. This article argues that digital storytelling as an applied theatre praxis can revision the ways we represent and engage young people in society. The author draws on practical examples from an applied theatre project to examine how digital storytelling, as both a creative process and a performance product, functions as a political act of cultural production. She demonstrates how, together, live and mediated performance practices offer young people an opportunity to reflect and archive – (re)vision and (re)construct – complex notions of identity, culture and community.

Keywords:

• digital storytelling
• applied theatre
• youth
• critical performance pedagogy
• representation

Notes

1. The term ‘prosumer’ was first coined by Alvin Toffler in 1981. This term is discussed in more detail in the article by Wu Qiongli (2009, 233–4).

2. You can find examples of digital stories at the Center for Digital Storytelling's website: http://www.storycenter.org/stories/ (accessed June 2011).

3. For examples of warm-ups that work to build ensemble, see Michael Rohd's Theatre for Community Conflict and Dialogue (1998) and Augusto Boal's Games for Actors and Non-Actors (1992).

4. For example, teams of participants might be asked to capture a series of photographs from their immediate environment that speak to the ways they think young people are valued in their school or community. These images might be furthered explored through the development of first-person narratives, poems or other modes of creative expression.