OPEN HOUSES

We applied for this project after identifying issues shared by the partners. On the one hand, the theatres expressed the need to improve their offers and actions aimed at young adults, especially...

The objectives of the project were to support young people's cultural citizenship, to innovate in terms of opening up and appropriating theatres, and to develop cooperation between groups of young people and professionals from these cultural institutions. In implementing Open Houses, we wanted to design hybrid and innovative responses through international encounters. European cooperation allowed us to discover other ways of doing things and to open up to other approaches. We wanted to give young people the possibility of questioning their links to the cultural institution, of (re)discovering it, of questioning how it works and of making a place for themselves through a collective experience understood as an apprenticeship, a commitment or a stage in their professionalization. Conversely, we wanted to accompany theatre professionals who are interested in the practices, desires and knowledge of young people to contribute to the development of their cultural offer. We wanted to lead a collective process of transformation, to constitute a space of transnational cooperation involving all the stakeholders and thus to innovate in the field of cultural action and support for the power to act.

The forms of activities were varied: workshop, seminar, discussions, visits, action research. The first transnational meeting was held in France to launch the partnership. This was followed by a training course on how to conduct a collective socio-cultural experimentation process in Romania. A second learning activity was proposed in Germany on the piloting of an embedded survey allowing to build a common reflexive posture to better support the capacity of young people to question their place within cultural institutions. A final learning activity took place in Romania to support young people in producing artistic materials to be used. Regarding the intellectual productions, the aim was, on the one hand, to carry out a programme of cultural actions by the pair of partners, youth collective and theatre, in each city, and on the other hand, to carry out a study and to produce artistic restitutions common to the three youth collectives on the experiences of cooperation between young people and theatre professionals. The approach is supported by two complementary transnational meetings in Germany and Romania. These productions were the subject of 3 dissemination events in each of the 3 cities and a final event in 2023.

With Open Houses, we have established a friendly and sensitive collective dynamic at both local and trinational level. We have also contributed to the fact that young people gain confidence in themselves, in their life project, in their capacity and in the development of their power to act. We were able to note a real appropriation of the project by the youth collectives and the theatres' professionals, resulting in a mutual consideration between the young people and the theatres as well as an appropriation of the theatres' space by each youth collective. This appropriation has led to advanced achievements, particularly with regard to the cultural actions developed by the young people. For the cultural institutions, this project contributed to the development of an international network between the theatres and their opening to the youth sector. The youth associations have developed a transversal approach through the partnership with the theatres, have opened up to the cultural sector and have benefited from large-scale resources. In addition, through the good practice guide we have developed a proposal for a pedagogical approach to learn through experimentation and cooperation with young people.