Surviving in the Cracks: A community-engaged methodology with an applied theatre collaborative script-analysis

Responding to cultural discourses and actions of oppression, members of the Vancouver Youth Vision Coalition (VYVC) used theatre-making and performance to build self-advocacy skills and their social activism through sharing their stories of being unhoused in the production of Surviving the Cracks, a youth-led, participatory theatrical production. VYVC is a youth-driven coalition that acts as an advocacy group and peer-to-peer support for youth who work on community projects and have precarious housing. Through a partnership with the University of British Columbia, the three VYVC youth-leaders – Davina, Fraggle, and Trevor – invited me to facilitate the creation of, direct, and research their theatrical production as a response to the government closures of the three underage safehouses in Vancouver, Canada (Wager 2014; Wager and Ansloos 2021; Wager et al. 2009). Eight youth, between the ages of 16 to 25 who had experience being unhoused, participated in the year-long project by doing character-building activities, journaling stories, improvising scenes, co-writing the script, interviewing safe house staff, visiting old safe house sites, and performing a play based on their lived experience. These informal learning practices at non-academic sites created engaging alternative learning spaces for these youth, most of whom had left formal schooling before or during high school (Wagner, Ansloos, and Thorburn, 2022). About a year after the performances of Surviving of the Cracks, Davina, a brilliant VYVC youth-leader, and I spent an afternoon reading and analyzing the script, noting historical events and spatial elements to further tell the story. The following collaborative script-analysis unpacks how the script was collectively created through a telling of the creation story and through a contextualizing youth/researcher analysis. My hope as a theatre-driven youth participatory action researcher, is that by reading the script and specifically the youth/researcher analysis, that we may not only further youth advocacy and activism within theatre education and applied theatre, but also think about crucial ways to co-analyze and explain our processes through collaborative methods of analysis, such as this one.