Engagement,Authenticity,and Advocacy in “Youth Uncensored”: Ethics in Applied Theater Research With Street-Involved Youth

The Problem With Labels

The label “high-risk,” was useful for communicating the urgency of youth’s needs to funders and service providers, but added to the stigma that the youth experienced. Youth did not identify with that label. As one youth commented in the video, “I wouldn’t call myself a high-risk youth, just a youth who doesn’t have as much as other youth” (00:04:56–00:05:08). Other youth described their life circumstances similarly:

[Youth like us have had] shitty cards handed to them in life . . . Not everyone has mommy and daddy to tuck them in at night and tell them it’s fuckin’ okay. A lot of us are really alone and scared and only have a crack pipe to turn to. (00:20:54–00:21:11)

A lot of people that live good lives or lives that have been privileged, they don’t understand what we go through . . . They don’t realize that even waking up in the morning is hard, stepping your foot out into a school is hard, taking a bus is hard, anything is hard when you don’t got what most people do. (00:31:40–00:32:12)

We did not use the label “high risk” in our work with youth, avoided labeling the youth altogether and created a scene (discussed later) that spoke to the labeling they often experienced.

Terms of Engagement

Lack in youth’s lives making their survival precarious also made their participation in the project tenuous. To navigate ethical tensions around youth’s engagement, ongoing attention to their needs was vital.

An Authentic Need to Tell

Our process began with youth telling stories of their experiences with service providers. Most youth were eager to share. Applied theater scholars (Salverson, 1996; Stuart Fisher, 2008) contend that those who have suffered trauma are compelled to tell about their experiences—there is necessity to be heard. Youth’s authentic desires to tell drew us all into ethical encounter as listeners. There was ethical demand to create space where youth felt safe, were listened to, heard, and their stories activated to do some good in the world. We did this through attending to their needs in a nonjudgmental environment, by amplifying their voices and positioning them as coresearchers and educators in workshops for service providers.

Many youth expressed how opportunities to tell their stories helped them. In two youth’s words, “Being able to tell my story, Uncensored helped me in that way . . . I didn’t really have the motivation to go out and tell people what I’ve been through, but it helps me too, I guess” (00:07:37–00:08:34).

I was asked by [name] to come to this project where I could share my past experiences. I could also have a positive outlet to express myself . . . And together the group that we made has supported me through finishing my high school diploma. (00:27:14–00:27:35)

While not aimed at eliciting youth’s testimony for their healing, we recognized that, for some youth, our work had this effect. Telling their stories were steps toward making change in their lives.

Youth not interested in collaboratively devising and rehearsing were invited to contribute in other ways. Some were active creators of original rap beats, lyrics, or spoken word poetry about their lives and happily shared. We recorded contributions or youth-performed introductory pieces for workshops. We used all youth’s stories as bases for our work, captured youth’s stories in ways they felt comfortable sharing, and worked to meaningfully integrate them into workshops.

Fact Versus Fiction

The fact/fiction distinction in performance informs questions of authenticity. In our introductions to workshops, we informed audiences that the stories shared were fictionalized accounts of youth’s experiences—abstracted representations, often compilations of several youth’s stories around common themes. They were self-conscious fabrications and could not have been otherwise. As Stuart Fisher (2008) insists, testimony is never entirely based on facts, but fragmented recollections “of emotional, physical and bodily associations, and remembrances” (p. 109). Wilkinson and Kitzinger (2008) concur that representation can never provide pure, direct, or true access to reality. Our scenes were based on stories youth chose to tell, selective elements they shared, perspectives from which they told them, and the ways we shaped them for presentation were neither “real” nor “not real” (Shaughnessy, 2005).

Salverson (1996) claims “the overly literal is a lie” (p. 184)—the right distance between facts and their representation is needed to create space to question, wonder, and change. For Garde and Mumford (2014), “‘inauthentic’ performance can paradoxically create a sense of authentic contact with aspects of reality and social truth” (p. 152). They suggest that play between authenticity and fictionalization is an appropriate strategy for “engagement with the act of trying to grasp social reality” (p. 164). Our scenes told emotional and experiential truths of youth’s experiences to grasp their social realities. Our re-presentations helped bridge youth experiences and audience understandings, which required ethical negotiation between performers and witnesses.

Gubrium and colleagues (2014) note that participatory research accounts involving creative representations rarely discuss the extent participants’ stories are shaped by facilitators. Acknowledging my contributions as dramaturge/director, our scenes were influenced by my aesthetic vision and facilitators’ shared commitment to systemic change. We had input into choosing stories to tell, details to include and exclude. For one scene, based on a youth’s story about feeling seen by service providers only as labels applied to her, I sought means to visualize the labels for aesthetic power. We created labels with clips to cumulatively attach to a youth character throughout the scene until they were completely obscured. When the service provider character saw the youth, all they saw were labels. To amplify youth’s storytelling, aspects were sometimes exaggerated for dramatic effect, presenting ethical tension to balance authenticity with aesthetic considerations. While facilitators had power to inform decisions about what went on stage, youth had opportunities to confirm our collective representations as true to what they wanted to say, thus maintaining some control over means of production; decisions around authenticity were made primarily by youth.

Authenticity Effects

With a core group of five to 10 youth who chose to perform, we needed to develop flexible performance strategies authentic to youth’s realities. Scenes collaboratively devised through improvisation were only loosely scripted, indicating the scenario structures, characters, key dialogue, and stage directions. During rehearsals, youth familiarized themselves with these scripts, then re-created scenes anew each time through improvisation. We never expected them to memorize dialogue, rather emphasizing particular details needed to tell the story. Roles were flexible, based on who was present and who wanted to try which role. Youth were astute at being in the moment to respond to twists that their fellow performers introduced. In forum theater activations, youth’s responses were always improvised. In talk-back with audiences, youth spoke interchangeably from their characters’ perspectives and from their own experiences. This improvised quality accentuated play between fact and fiction.

We asked performers to commit to performances, but sometimes, youth who had rehearsed, were unable to attend. Then, we needed to change up roles and details of scenes based on who was there. To accommodate last-minute changes, loose structures and flexibility were paramount. Youth’s performances confirmed Kidd’s (1984) claim that applied theater,

may lack the polish of professionalism but it will make up for this with the authenticity and concern of people who live the situation they are presenting . . . Lack of technical skill will be overcome by great energy and vividness. (p. 8)

Regardless of how prepared or underprepared, the impact of youth’s performances was impressive—the power of their presence palpable. When they got onto stage in front of audiences, youth fully embodied their expertise and right to be seen and heard. They expressed the power these experiences had for them:

Being able to go on a stage helps me . . . it gives me a lot of confidence . . . I could never do this before. (00:08:04–00:08:23)

When we went to [city] . . . I liked how they brought us down there and we were honourary guests. They made us feel really important . . . The best part was when we got a standing ovation . . . I was like, damn, people are actually learning from us. I felt like they really respected what we had to say. Ya, I felt, like, really important at that moment. (00:14:33–00:14:54)

Uncensored does empower me. It gives me a voice. Before I was completely voiceless and alone and now I’m actually able to say what’s going on and actually have people hear me and actually hopefully get some support out of it . . . Uncensored has definitely helped me. . . because you’re constantly on stage and constantly challenging yourself . . . so it’s really good. (00:32:29–00:32:57)

Representing Youth

Issues of representation pose ethical complexities to navigate; we needed to find balance between representing youth ethically (Preston, 2008), while maintaining authenticity. Wilkinson and Kitzinger (2008) relay how feminist practitioners overcame the problem of representing or speaking for others, by speaking only for themselves. For Uncensored, this ethical tension was overcome by inviting youth to speak for themselves. The uncensored nature of their contributions—their stories, language, and behaviors on stage—served to maintain authenticity. As Wilkinson and Kitzinger note, however, speaking for one’s identity group does not evade the problem of assuming all members of that group share similar perspectives. While youth spoke for themselves collectively, undoubtedly, nuances of individuals’ stories were lost in our compilations. The collective stories, however, avoided implicating individuals in behaviors potentially viewed as undesirable.

The nature of our scenes necessitated youth characters presented as experiencing struggles related to substance use, activities outside the law, violence, family dysfunction, and so on. Realistic portrayals showed youth engaged in self-destructive behaviors or as belligerent and uncooperative to service providers, so presented them not in the best light. Our workshops emphasized these behaviors as symptoms of youth’s life circumstances and sought to offer insights into sources of those behaviors. We had to find balance, then, in representing their behavior as not unproblematic, nor position them as powerless victims, which would have been disempowering. Youth found that authentic reflection on their experiences helped them better understand their struggles: “Uncensored has definitely helped me get through a lot of issues, to understand why I was addicted to drugs a lot better and helped me figure out a lot of things about myself” (00:32:32–00:32:55). Ultimately, by taking to the stage to portray themselves and engaging in dialogue with service providers, youth claimed their roles as artists, performers, educators, and researchers.

Authentic Purpose

Speaking about their struggles was an authentic response for youth. Some said they wanted to tell their stories to educate service providers to help other youth in similar circumstances. Some said they wished to, and ultimately did, pursue careers to help other youth. In the video, two youth commented, “If I can impact somebody, or one person, that’s even what I want to do as a social worker, just improve the lives of other people . . . So, doing Uncensored helps me do that” (00:34:10–00:34:59). “In hopes that I could benefit someone else’s life, I have stayed with Uncensored ever since” (00:27:25–00:27:29). These youth felt their experiences of struggle would benefit their work in helping others.

Youth’s performances allowed audiences to see youth in new light, as indicated by comments from the evaluation of service provider outcomes. The workshop “helped me to understand these youth as articulate individuals who have well-founded opinions and expectations”; “opened my eyes to not only the challenges and hardships [youth] have faced, but more importantly their strengths and talents”; “really made me think about who [youth] are and what they might need instead of assuming that they are only going to give me grief” (E&RS, 2011, pp. 16–17). Through performances, service providers were able to see beyond challenges, deficits, and damage by which they previously defined youth.

Regardless of measures taken to represent youth ethically and authentically, when youth experience their stories presented for public scrutiny and analysis, objectification or “othering” of their struggles is inevitable and comes with risks (Sinding et al., 2008), as in the example of our performance for police (shared in detail in the following section) where a youth reported officers questioning him after the performance. In the video, this youth tells about regularly being targeted by police because he is Indigenous. Forum theater mitigated risks to some extent by allowing for dialogic performance (Conquergood, 1985); authentic dialogue was strategic for disrupting othering. The line between potential harm and benefit in representing others, however, remains ever blurry.

Dialogic Performance

Working with Theater of the Oppressed techniques (Boal, 1979), youth were, more or less, framed as “oppressed” and service providers as “oppressors” (or potential allies). Although not using language of oppression, power differentials at play in life and on stage, between youth and those meant to help them, were central to our work (Nicholson, 2005). Our ethical intention was not to blame or implicate service providers in wrongdoing (Weinblatt & Harrison, 2011), but to engage with those more powerful to explore solutions to systemic oppressions faced by youth. Our workshops opened space for youth to confront, converse with, or educate service providers. Those who attended generally wanted to do better at serving youth’s needs and were open to conversation. These were “integral audience[s] . . . already interested and engaged” (Prendergast & Saxton, 2009, p. 192), committed to exploring this content even if critical of their actions. For some, it was the first time they had candid dialogue with youth about youth’s experiences. These were “dialogical performances,” described as bringing together different worldviews and value systems in conversation—a path to genuinely understanding another, and thus an ethical performance stance (Conquergood, 1985). Based on evaluations, the dialogic workshop space offered productive exploration of power dynamics to promote understanding of youth for service providers.

Mitigating Risk of Re-Traumatization

Applied theater scholars (Salverson, 1996; Sinding et al., 2008; Stuart Fisher, 2008) discuss dangers of re-traumatizing participants when engaging in retelling difficult stories. The incidents we depicted—youth’s ineffective interactions with service providers—were not among the most traumatizing experiences in youth’s lives, but their traumatic experiences, requiring assistance, were certainly implicated in their stories. Our portrayals often touched on these inciting incidents, with disregard from service providers compounding distress experienced, heightening youth’s vulnerability in retelling—a significant ethical concern (Sinding et al., 2008). Our efforts at attending to youth’s struggles and working to address them, characterized by care and community, mitigated potential re-traumatization. One instance of storytelling, for example, rekindled conflict between two youth. The outreach worker, through close connections with both youth, was able to intervene to avoid potential escalation.

Our fictionalizing of stories helped mitigate risk, while also requiring attention to authenticity as discussed above. We sought the right balance between portraying youth’s struggles for perverse entertainment value (“trauma porn”), while negotiating risk of difficult emotions arising (van Fossen & Ndejuru, 2017). To provide aesthetic distance, externalizing stories enough to avoid re-traumatization, those who performed never played themselves, although characters were sometimes similar to them or experiences depicted resonated with theirs. In the liminal performance space, youth were simultaneously playing the “not me” and the “not not me” (Schechner, 1985, p. 123). This captured authenticity of their presentations while providing a safety net. In the video, emotion in youth’s voices and faces when mentioning difficult experiences was evident, but they never implied portraying incidents was painful or re-traumatizing. Conversely, they described opportunities to tell their stories as personally healing and empowering. What youth shared in the video, however, did not account for the project’s affects for all youth involved throughout the process. If there were adverse effects from youth’s involvement, we would surely have learned of them from outreach workers who maintained close contact with all youth.

Avoiding Damage-Centered Research

Gubrium and colleagues (2014) discuss research depictions of difficult stories as potentially “reify[ing] existing stereotypes about marginalization . . . [with] tension over the potential for both emancipatory and oppressive outcomes” (p. 1610). As many youth participants were Indigenous, in retrospect, Indigenous scholarship supported reflection on advocacy for Indigenous youth (see Conrad, 2020).

Unangax̂ scholar Tuck (2009) calls for suspension of damage-centered research, depicting individuals as damaged or broken, in favor of research that captures desire, is generative, and engaged. Desire-based research shifts theory of change away from an oversimplifying binary of reproduction and resistance toward synthesis of oppression and agency, creating space for exploring complexities of personhood, including contradictions, complicities, and interdependencies. It does not ignore loss and despair, but emphasizes hope, vision, wisdom of individuals and communities, and celebrates survivance as “more than survival, more than endurance and mere response . . . an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (Vizenor, 2008, p. 15). Survivance indicates presence as active, vibrant, and alive, and survival as resistance to dominant discourses of disappearance. Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi theater scholar, Carter (2007), highlights significance of stories, the power of re-creation stories and re-creative acts as “survivance-intervention” (p. 61). This ethical stance was exhibited in our work.

Our project addressed experiences of youth in dire need and so featured damage narratives. However, our representations did not blame youth for their struggles, rather identified the complex web of circumstances leading to their struggles and highlighted their strengths. Our project offered counter-representations to how youth are usually perceived, showing them in new light. In one scene, for example, a youth deemed “problem student” for late-coming and falling asleep in class was revealed as a loving caregiver to parent and infant sibling.

Representing Service Providers

In advocating for youth, we minimized curtailing how youth depicted themselves or service provider characters. We worked with youth to consider service providers’ perspectives, to portray fair and realistic representations. In one scene, a youth was stranded on the city’s outskirts after a party with no money or shoes—someone having stolen them. The youth called their social worker at the end of a workday asking for help, which the social worker was unable to provide—needing to attend other obligations. The social worker suggested the youth call the youth crisis line, but the youth had already burnt that bridge, had no minutes left on their phone, and had also gotten expelled from their residential placement. In devising this scene, we fostered youth’s understandings of professional boundaries constraining service providers. Nor did scenes suggest simple solutions to challenges of giving and receiving assistance; the forum theater interventions confirmed the complexities of aiding youth.

Ethical tension arose in depicting service providers—showing negative interactions with youth was not particularly favorable to them. These were undoubtedly uncomfortable spaces for audiences whose quality of work was questioned. As our intention was advocacy for youth, and as audience members were there in professional capacities, we were not overly concerned with sparing their feelings. As critique was integral to our work (Sinding et al., 2008), it ran the risk of alienating audiences, which it sometimes did, as one service provider expressed: “Sitting us in opposition to each other didn’t foster co-operation. It was ‘us’ vs. ‘them’!” (E&RS, 2011, p. 13). Mostly, however, audiences appreciated hearing directly from youth about their experiences.

Our most challenging audience included several police officers quite resistant to critiquing their own behaviors. As resistance or defensiveness is antithetical to learning, this was an ethical tension we encountered. One scene depicted a highly contentious issue in our city: Peace Officers’ treatment of youth when caught on public transportation without proof of payment. Youth were often charged and fined, although clearly unable to pay, leading to further charges, failed court appearances, and ongoing legal barriers sometimes ensnaring youth for years. The argument against such charges was that ensuing public legal costs far outweighed the few dollars youth had not paid to access public transportation.

The scene was set in a transit station. A security officer approached two youth aggressively from the outset. One youth’s transfer was 10 minutes expired. The officer asked for ID, but the youth claimed not to have it and refused to provide their name. The officer decided to charge the youth. His attempt to handcuff them escalated into argumentative verbal exchange and ended in physical altercation. When an officer came onto stage for an intervention, they attempted to convince the youth their behavior was the problem, rather than considering how the peace officer’s behavior might change to interact more positively with the youth. In their improvised response, youth held firm to their conviction that the officer’s expectations were unjust; the intervenor also refused to budge. The performed scenario was highly unsettling for youth and the officer, forcing us to stop the performance to talk through everyone’s concerns.

Although this situation was particularly frustrating, the youth nevertheless appreciated opportunities for such dialogue with police, as evinced by the following youth’s comments:

The most memorable workshop for me that Uncensored put on was because some of [the audience members] were really awesome and really worked with us well and the other half was really resistant. It was interesting to see that balance because usually people are really nice and they’re all like, ya, we should work with you that way instead of this way, and these guys were like, no, you have to listen to us because we’re right and you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re just a stupid street kid. It was interesting. (00:10:20–00:10:44)

Uncensored gives me an outlet to speak my voice, to, like, cops. I get to talk to them about what they do to me. Some of them take and listen, but other cops, no. I remember one time we did a show for cops. Those cops still seemed like they were on duty while they were at our workshop. They were like interrogating me on the side while I was there, but I still got to speak a little bit. At the graffiti [workshop], I was talking to those cops. It was good because they took and listened. The cops from [another city], they were nice. They went back to [city] and did a workshop on attitude adjustment. I felt good about those cops. [The other cops] felt like they have to follow their guidelines instead of taking our advice . . . like, okay, we have to gain a little respect for these kids and build a relationship. (00:28:56–00:34:59)

Youth indicated that the workshops provided them opportunities for empowerment—to speak out, be heard, and make a difference. They were able to analyze the instance with police when they felt unheard by comparing it to other occasions they felt were more productive. The question remains whether this workshop had any impact on how police officers view youth or might respond to them in future.

Unanticipated Repercussions

Applied theater scholar Thompson (2008) notes that, however altruistic intentions of an applied theater project, it is always bounded by historically structured power dynamics. Wilkinson and Kitzinger (2008) concur there is no possibility of completely evading the grasp of power as power is deeply implicated in constructing portrayals of others. It is prudent, then, to consider how our project performed within larger sociopolitical contexts and what adverse repercussions might have arisen.

Thompson (2008) suggests applied theater, as advocacy, can be both therapeutic and political in “shift[ing] between tactical and strategic performance practice” (p. 121); “tactics” enact private temporary resistance, whereas “strategies” maneuver toward public structural change. Arguably, our project succeeded at its tactical outcomes in giving youth opportunities for moments of empowerment, but there also remained many unresolved ethical tensions. Was youth empowerment enough to justify exposing their struggles? How might our representations have hindered youth, in ways not considered? Did our project have any lasting structural impact? Did listening to youth’s stories really change attitudes and behaviors of service providers? Or did it merely expose youth to the gaze of service providers, whose listening was sometimes conflicted? Did exposing youth make them vulnerable to appropriation by public opinion? Did it reinforce the view of street-involved youth as broken and damaged, despite efforts not to? Did it merely serve to feed the “trauma industry?” Although answers remain elusive, such questions must be asked in relation to any applied theater project.