"Since primary school, we've been talking about global warming. I was made aware of the climate, waste sorting, animal extinction and melting ice at a very early age. Now that I'm independent from my parents and living on my own, I've made choices that are in line with the ecological transition. It seemed impossible to do otherwise, because it affects me too much. A few months ago I discovered, while looking into Monsanto, that glyphosate is undoubtedly the main cause of the cancer that struck my mother in 2008. Tongues are starting to wag, but there's a silence around this subject that I find absolutely unbearable, and action against them is still far too slow and inadequate."
The personal story narrated byt a young actor is included in a new edition by GRESYS, a collaboration between an Italian theatre,
Teatro alla Guilla, and two French theatre companies,
ALTER EGO (X) and
La TransPlanisphere, to create theatre workshops between 2023 and 2024.
Based on an artistic interpretation of the agenda, the group used theatre as a site for youth expression, facilitating and encouraging young people to learn and express ecological and political realities through theatrical acts. They note ‘Theatre as a tool for informal education is one of the most appropriate ways of inviting young people to translate the Agenda and make it their own’.
The publication’s first tier starts with an archive of stories collected from the participants of the workshops before they began. The stories ‘Green stories’ are a collection of narratives broadly based on the young person’s relationship to ecology and the environment. As in the quote above by a young participant, they show-cased mixed experiences. Some young people spoke through memories, fears, optimism, dreams of ecological utopias, etc. Some accounts referenced initiatives, such as workshops on ecological film with young people, or the French small-scale farming initiative,
AMAP.
The second tier expands on a methodology set up by La Transplanisphere, a theatre initiative that grounds theatrical practice in social, political and civic issues and actions. The outcomes of these workshops were two performances that took place in France and Italy [2024]. The published stories, collected in this report, were the foundation to the narrative framework drawing from this method of storytelling to theatrical action.
GRESYS, co-funded by the Erasmus + EU program, sought to raise young people's awareness of the UN 2030 agenda's objectives by highlighting their own ecological experiences and commitments through theatrical storytelling. A publication on the project was released this September (2024).
You can
download the book here
