Search

This article adheres to UN guidelines concerning the Decade of Healthy Ageing (2021-2030) which aim to improve the lives of the older population. The objective of this study is to show how social dance with artistic-scenic purposes for a socially vulnerable group of older adults (third and fourth age) contributes to active ageing from social and health perspectives. The sample comes from a social group for the over-60s years and forms part of an artistic-community project in which participant observation has been carried out for five years. To obtain more data from the sample group, an "ad hoc" measurement instrument is developed based on a specific literature review on the topic. The results show that dance, group, and stage performance are a vital driver for members. The analysis shows that individual perspectives are higher than group perspectives. The research provides evidence that social dance groups improve motor expressiveness, stimulate the ability to think, memorize and create, among other aspects.

Background: This research explored how classroom plays could serve as pedagogical tools to introduce children to Sesotho and isiZulu vocabulary of artificial intelligence (AI). The article captures how student teachers learned to write plays that they could produce when they become professional teachers. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to explore how student teachers engaged in a playwriting process, creating drama texts for early grades primary school learners about AI. Method: The qualitative study employed, a participatory action research design. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with the student teachers, coupled with a dual analysis of their drama texts. An inductive thematic analysis approach was applied for the data from interviews with the students. A deductive approach was implemented to analyse the drama texts according to criteria for playwriting with a pedagogical purpose. Results: The findings revealed that playwriting as a tool for pedagogy can be useful in developing student teachers' vocabulary of AI in Sesotho or isiZulu and to develop their playwriting skills. Conclusion: The findings contribute to the corpus of pedagogies for the teaching of vocabulary in African languages, which includes writing the texts and aiming to use these for reading experience and for dramatic activity in early grades classrooms. Contribution: The contribution of this study is how playwriting can serve as a pedagogical tool for the teaching of reading and vocabulary in the primary school.

The presence of non-disabled artists challenges the possibility of disability aesthetics in arts and disability projects. This study therefore examines the meaning of disability for the aesthetics of their collaborations and artistic practice through in-depth interviews with twelve Belgian non-disabled performing artists. The findings show that the collaborations often confirm their artistic practice in which the 'able-bodied' notion is no longer of their interest. Yet beliefs are also observed that can reinforce ableist ideas and the aesthetic appropriation of disability. Disability aesthetics in arts and disability can only develop fully when structural barriers to disabled performers in the mainstream are removed.

This study aims to determine the influence of practice-based active learning on students' interest and response in learning local culture in drama classes. The research was conducted at public universities in Indonesia using two active learning strategies. Qualitative methods using participatory techniques, interviews, and observations were carried out in collecting data for this study. The sample of this research is fifty drama class students. The analysis of data was done after the drama classes ended, which was marked by the process of assessing student learning outcomes through stage performances. This study showed a statistically significant increase in students' interest and response to learning local culture through collaborative learning methods and role-play in drama classroom learning. This study recommends adopting an active learning strategy in teaching local cultural materials to students. Further research is recommended on designing different active learning strategies with other variables and in different locations.

In this study we introduce "lesson play experience" (LPE) for implementation as professional development for in-service teachers. LPE is an extension of the "lesson play" notion, which refers to a script for an imagined lesson, written by a teacher, presented as dialogue of teacher-student(s) interaction. In mathematics teacher education, lesson play has been used primarily with prospective teachers as a complement to traditional lesson planning. The LPE includes, in addition to a script for (part of) a lesson, observations of the actual taught lesson, and interviews with the teacher-playwriter in which the script and the lesson are discussed. We report on two rounds of one teacher LPE and the resulting modification. The investigation has shown that the LPE can be an effective tool for in-service teacher professional development.

This article analyses approaches to listening when creating theatre using the words of real people via a recent tribunal play by Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicolas Kent, "Value Engineering: Scenes from the Grenfell Inquiry" (2021). The article considers the play in relation to transitional justice practices to reveal how listening functioned in its creation and development. It posits the repurposing of the terms 'macro listening' and 'micro listening' to distinguish between two particular forms that listening took on the project. The example of "Value Engineering" serves to demonstrate complex and multimodal approaches to listening when staging legal testimony.

It is well researched, yet under-acknowledged in policy and practice, that prison alone is unsuccessful in reducing criminality. Though in the USA recidivism is high, recidivism is both a common and limited measure, rarely capturing individual nuances. This paper presents key findings from an ethnographically-informed exploration of a well-established multi-sited Shakespeare-focussed prison-based programme boasting broader positive outcomes, specifically surrounding one research question: What are the perceived outcomes of engagement in prison-based Shakespeare programmes, as reported by participants and practitioners? This paper outlines key overarching findings, surrounding perceived impacts of participation through the use of Shakespeare in multiple perceived roles (including playwright, character, mentor, friend, educator), work around literacy, emotional and expression skills and programme practices (including theatre-based activities, spaces, solo, group and ensemble activities, practitioner-participant interactions and ethos). These are connected to social-justice issues, concluding an overarching outcome of potential (re)humanisation of people in prison to society and themselves.

Cinema's pedagogical essence nurtures a variety of educational strategies. Beyond serving as a support to other areas of knowledge or as the subject of artistic analysis, it also provides students with a means to give -- freely and significantly -- voice to their own concerns and interests. Short film production in schools can offer a process for young people to deal with personal and social challenges, fostering a closer connection between them and their community and environment. Schools are natural habitats for this encounter -- a place where film production can generate significant educational and cultural resonance. This paper reflects on the didactic potential of short film production in schools -- as a key to fulfil formal and non-formal pedagogical goals -- through the presentation and analysis of a recently implemented methodology for education through film: Olhar pela Lente, a project developed in Portugal during 2018.

Efforts to define creativity have started in the 20th century, with the emergence and spread of psychology as a modern discipline. The relationship between creativity and art education is frequently researched globally in the last twenty years, but studies on the relationship between creativity and performing arts education are few in number. Researching the relationship between creativity and dramatic writing education in context of theoretical approaches and practical techniques could develop new ideas and practical tools to be used. The current study aims to examine the usability of the Six Thinking Hats Technique, which is a creative thinking practice, in playwriting education in Turkey. The method of the study is based on a review of available literature and a case study. First, the creativity concept and creative processes were examined; then the Six Thinking Hats Technique was adopted to be implemented in composing a play-text. The study groups consisted of eight sophomore dramatic writing students who have completed their third semester in a public university in Turkey. Lastly, the participant's opinions were analyzed with a final test. The study concludes that the Six Thinking Hats Technique can be used in group studies, genre determination and final production in playwriting education in Turkey. This technique may also be used to develop new ideas and practice strategies in intra-class group activities during playwriting education.

In this commentary, summarized from a recent interview, the author shares insights and memories from a career devoted to drama and performance studies. He enthusiastically recounts events, initiatives, and collaborations that have helped sustain his lifelong passion for performance.

This article describes how dramatic writing and performance practices can be used to reshape qualitative interview data into a verbatim theatre performance with the intent of drawing attention to social movements in education. The performance described in the article reveals the consequences of a punitive educational policy agenda and addresses the emotional toll school grading and other neoliberal policies have had on teachers at a school in the southwestern United States. A primary objective is to examine and explore how verbatim dramatic writing and performance tactics can amplify current issues and social dilemmas and evoke an emotional response in the absence of dramatic action. The methods of writing a script from qualitative data are presented for other scholars and educators who intend to create performances from data.

The following article explores how one researcher blended verbal and visual literacies to disrupt conceptualizations of traditional qualitative research. Engaging visual modalities as a research tool, the author invites readers into an a/r/tographical multimodal post qualitative journey that deeply explores the power and value of visual research. Here the author shares a dynamic encounter with post theory that disrupted habits of knowing, thus creating tensions and nuanced understandings of theoretical engagement. (Re)imagining theory as a conceptual medium, readers are invited into the process through both visual and verbal means, to inspire investigation into previously unknown territory, thus discovering new ways to know differently. What is offered here moves the reader beyond the text based manuscript to a documentary film, (hyperlinked) screenplay, and artwork.

The aim of this article is to explore how the multiple perspectives offered by an artographer's lens contribute to three literacy events generated by "writing play" activities for children three to five years old. These events are part of a more comprehensive study of emergent literacy in writing play workshops, focusing on writing in different displays and with different writing tools. The artographer in the comprehensive study is Solveig Åsgard Bendiksen, also the first author in this article. The two other co-authors contribute with artographic methodology and with concepts from agential realism in the analysis of three literacy events. The intra-actions between the artographer, the children, the affects, the affordance of rich materials, and the context as performative agents in diffractive reading produced a number of findings concerning emergent writing literacy, especially concerning emergent cultural literacy.

This article investigates how playwriting served three middle school Black girls within a larger practitioner research study seeking to better understand the literate practices of girls of color. It delves into the ways that playwriting provided the girls in an afterschool writing club opportunities to explore both their knowledge and ways of knowing, rooted in their cultural, gendered, and racialized experiences, and, in turn, share these with others, within an academic setting. It points to the necessity for creating writing pedagogies that celebrate experiential, cultural, emotional, and relational knowledge, using playwriting as an example.

This article reflects on the ethics and process of writing and performing the play "This Is Us" with a group of rejected asylum seekers from Deportation Centre Sjaelsmark in Denmark. Positioned within larger frameworks of political and media hostility, the group pushed for a more radical approach of 'not just theatre', but called instead for solidarity within and beyond moments of collective writing. From this process, 'dramaturgical ethics' arose as an aesthetic and ethical practice, which can support thinking through responsibilities and relationalities involved in research, theatre making and entering into the world together.

There is a persistent view that reading Shakespeare's writings is automatically 'good' for student learning, and its persistence can be traced back to the beginnings of the modern education system as a tool of British imperialism. This article argues that his plays challenge audiences and readers in ways that can represent barriers to learning. In overcoming these barriers, the students can complete valuable lessons on how to learn. One way to do this, it is suggested, is by developing preliminary exercises based on developing plays as adaptations of existing stories and formats rather than as self-contained pieces of spontaneous artistic creation. Students can then compare their own products with Shakespeare's adaptations of the same stories, with the goal being to discover Shakespeare's writing in the process of change.

Edgar manages to invert the subordinate function of generally accepted objective indicators of membership of a particular national group--language, religion, common history, and territory--into the essential mode of imperative distinction shaping the unique national identity. In other words, it is the fresco and the value assigned to it that defines and consigns meaning to Catholic or Orthodox denomination, the refugees, and their hostages in Pentecost, not vice versa. The fact that it is only after they learn about the hypothetically enormous estimated value of the painting that Fr Petr Karolyi and Fr Sergei Bojovic fervently announce the fresco (as well as the abandoned church where it was discovered) as belonging to their particular denomination, which enunciates that each of the national constituents in their lack of distinctive features suffers from processes similar to the major redesigning and reconstruction of the sense of identity in the nation.

A study of former participants in high and middle school playwriting programs investigated students' perceptions of their experiences. After 20+ years of partnerships in a wide range of schools, Washington D.C.'s Young Playwrights' Theater examined how and why playwriting works and for whom. How does the form and process of writing plays motivate students, including some who don't like to write or struggle in English class? The results offer intriguing insights about the nature of playwriting and the impact of relationships with mentors, peers, and audiences to influence students' skills, motivation and self-perceptions as writers.

Understanding, encouraging and developing creativity in the classroom is an international priority (Craft, 2011). This article outlines the findings of research into playwriting pedagogy. It interrogates the conceptual assumptions that surround teaching and learning for creativity, and how these ideas influence teacher practice and student experience. It argues that student engagement and creativity are fundamentally and reciprocally linked. To better understand how to teach and foster creativity in a classroom, teachers' views on creativity and creative processes are explored through Csikszentmihalyi's (2008) theory of "flow" and the lessons this provides for understanding engagement. The article argues that the teachers' views of creativity and creative processes are of fundamental importance to understanding the teaching and learning experience and that student disengagement can be addressed by increasing student's skills and knowledge both in creativity processes and playwriting proficiency.

In this study, analysis of video recordings of 5-year-old children's use of language and nonverbal modes of communication (e.g. gaze, action, gesture, and proximity) is used to examine how children contribute to sociodramatic play narratives and participate in the classroom peer culture. In their dramatic play at a restaurant play center and at a grocery store dramatic play center, eight focus children took up narrative playwright roles, where they contributed to the narrative of the dramatic play, mainly by expressing their own needs and by making connections or providing information to their peers. Children took up intervening playwright roles, in which they changed the direction of the narrative, changed or suggested a change of role, or assigned a new role to an object, most frequently by expressing desires or by providing new information. Dramatic play provided an authentic context for the children to try out various social strategies and to observe how others responded to their efforts, in order to position themselves in desirable ways within the classroom social network. Children took up powerful roles through frequency of participation and through directing others' actions and maintaining the use of desired objects when continuing the play narrative by taking up narrative playwright roles. In addition, they used humor and made imaginative suggestions for roles and plots when taking up intervening playwright roles where they introduced new characters, roles for objects, and plots. Our research provides examples of peers teaching each other in dramatic play through the responses they give to each other and through modeling social approaches that allow them to fulfill desired social purposes and take up powerful social roles in the peer network.

The participants in this study are 9-year-olds who demonstrate signs of incipient alienation. Even with an experienced teacher who had a positive relationship with her students, some students describe school as boring. The arts may provide a path away from alienation when learning is embedded in the students' cultural knowledge and when the artistic process is primary. Our research question was, "What do students learn when engaged in a playwriting experience in school?" The evidence suggests that students discovered fun, freedom, and a sense of agency with language arts as a result of their participation in the program.

This study has attempted to revisit gender issues presented in the New Literatures of Africa in English to investigate whether there is, indeed, an alternative vision of these issues. In spite of the great contributions of female writers in this literature, it has continued to be a male-dominated terrain. It is from this perspective that we decided to draw inspiration from Bole Butake's "Dramaturgy" to assess his contribution to this alternative vision of gender in modern Africa Literature. Bole Butake is a significant Cameroonian male dramatist who writes sensitively on issues that concern the African Women in general and the Cameroonian Women in particular. We have demonstrated in this work that in spite of Butake's enormous contributions to issues of gender, his female roles do not conform totally to what women themselves expect. The sociological and feminist theories have been utilised in this study to come out with the following findings: First, there seem to be an alternative vision of gender in the New Literatures of Africa in English. Second, we posit that a major preoccupation of the female-oriented works of art in this literature is the exploration of the various pains that their characters encounter as women. Third, that most of the artists, if not all, present women reacting because they have been subjected or exploited by their male counterparts. Our final contention in this essay is that in order for us to have a total and positive alternative vision of gender in Modern African Literature, the artists should not only present the type of female characters that they have but should also attempt to balance the depiction of the pain with the development of consciousness-raising and role-modeling which are definite aspects of black feminist aesthetics.

This article introduces a pedagogical intervention that includes a set of creative activities designed to improve the oral and written production of students in the English classroom, especially those who have shown a lack of interest or attention. It was observed that participants initially seemed careless about studying the language. Eventually they responded to the proposed methods positively and were more willing and motivated to participate in chain games, creative writing, and screenwriting exercises. The activities helped develop the students' fluency in both oral and written production and improved their understanding of English grammar and structure.

Arts integration is relevant in the context of the increased demand for creative thinkers in a global economy. However, reaching across disciplinary boundaries is less common in higher education. Arts integration is one way that a literature class can "trespass" onto the dramatic arts. This paper reports on a study of integrating the dramatic arts into a university general education course. It addresses the relationships between literature and theater and the benefits of integrating artistic practice to cultivate creativity and enhance learning. The study investigates the process and outcomes of making a one-act play. The findings show that art and the process of creation/making promote collaboration and help students synthesize and put into practice what they have learned. Such strategies are necessary to maximize the benefits of general education and are likely to foster creative interdisciplinary approaches beyond the institution. The lack of objective quantifiable results is a study limitation.

Background / Context: This conceptual essay contributes to recent education research on immigrant youth from West African countries that examines the interplay of popularized narratives of immigrant youth and young adults, and their Diasporic literacy practices. Specifically, we examine embodied Diaspora literacies as affirming and extending presences and absences of Black immigrant bodies across two contexts: an after-school African Club, and a qualitative inquiry of civic learning and action-taking of immigrant youth and young adults from West African countries. Purpose: We theorize in this conceptual essay the interplay of the humanity of Black immigrant youth and young adults and their embodied Diaspora literacy practices. We highlight possibilities for research, literacy teaching, and teacher education when intentionally naming, affirming, and building with the humanity of Black immigrant youth and young adults from West African countries--what we conceptualize as humanizing the Black immigrant body. We conceptualize humanizing the Black immigrant body as an enacting of embodied Diaspora literacies. In theorizing embodied Diaspora literacies, we build with African Indigenous lensings, and African, Black, and Chicana/Latina feminisms. We further contextualize humanizing the Black immigrant body as an enacting of embodied Diaspora literacies expressed in the creative and artistic practices and artifacts of artists, literary authors, playwrights, and youth and young adults who have long authored and told narratives that affirm, extend, and historicize the strengths of Black immigrant communities. Interpretive Analysis: We highlight in this conceptual essay the urgency of humanizing the Black immigrant body across four moments, or tellings of embodied Diaspora literacies. Our use of Diasporic tellings, an intentional naming and humanizing research approach, draws on the words of Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author who reflected on the urgency of a global "balance of stories." We examine four Diasporic tellings: (1) youth in an African Club in a high school in New York City attending an off-Broadway play authored by a daughter of Ghanaian immigrants; (2) participating in a group discussion following the play; (3) engaging in Youth Participatory Action Research inquiries; and (4) youth and young adults from West African countries discussing their creative and artistic embodied Diaspora literacies, and civic learning and action-taking across contexts of peers, schooling, and families. Conclusion / Recommendations: We theorize humanizing the Black immigrant body as a vibrant, necessary research and teaching stance to recognize the humanity of Black immigrant youth who daily negotiate and render visible their language and literacy practices. These practices comprise the coalescing of Black immigrant bodies, discursive perspectives, and material artifacts of teaching and learning, and their racialized, social, and educational experiences across contexts of schools and communities. These Diasporic tellings provide important insights for productive approaches in research, teaching, and teacher education with youth and young adults making sense of the lives of Black immigrants, across contexts of literacy learning and lived experiences that meaningfully recognize the humanity of Black immigrant youth from West African countries.

Many first-year students struggle with the transition from high school writing to college writing as higher-order demands are made and new discipline-specific genres are added. Previous writing training can provide a "mental set effect," old habits of mind, which inhibits growth. Additionally, students receive writing training in courses other than the composition class that may further interfere with development and the acquisition of the critical thinking needed for college writing. In this article, we argue that playwriting exercises, informed by Vygotsky's theory of play, offer a mode to foster critical thinking common to writing practice across the academy and actuate Burke's "parlor" of academic discourse. Writing-About-Writing (WAW) after playwriting exercises strengthens writer identity and facilitates the transfer of knowledge to other genres.

The application of drama strategies which focus more on meaning than on form can provide an impetus for ESL learners to be more confident about speaking, thereby increasing the quantity of their spoken English. This paper discusses existing research and the author's own experiences in an attempt to highlight the positive effects of improvisations, playwriting and rehearsals on the oral output of learners in relation to communicative English.

The treatment of a research paper as an isolated utterance within a composition classroom is problematic in that such papers may fail to encourage transfer of writing knowledge. In this essay, I argue that a research paper's failure to work as a utterance situated within a conversation--as critiqued through a framework constructed by Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the utterance--often disadvantages students in their future writing endeavors. I conclude by suggesting one way to encourage students to situate their research writing as a part of--rather than separate from--an activity system. By making the research paper an integral part of a entire course sequence, students will be better equipped to understand the role that research and writing plays within a specific activity system. (Contains 2 notes.)

Background: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's (UWM) Urban Teacher World Pre-College Academy works with American high school students to explore what it means to be an educator in the urban context. High school students from underrepresented groups reside at the UWM campus to work with university faculty, staff and students to explore careers in education. In so doing, the participants experience education beyond the traditional classroom. Aims: One of the School of Education's recruitment initiatives, this program encourages students of color to explore potential careers in education. Twenty-one high school students read, wrote plays, created multimedia art, and performed together to investigate what it means to be an educator in the 21st century. Attendees identified potential careers and university majors leading to occupations in the field of education. Arguments: Through close mentoring relationships between high school students, college students, and university faculty and staff, pre-college programs attract underrepresented people to the field education. These relationships support underrepresented people to identify as successful college attendees. Given the teacher shortage and the lack of success to recruit people of color to the ranks of professional educators, pre-college programs are another route universities should consider. Conclusion: This collaboration addressed the School of Education's goal of increasing the diversity of its student body and thereby increasing the diversity of the teaching profession.

A theater project situated within an Alternative to Incarceration Program (ATIP), the Insight Project provided a venue for youth to engage in storytelling and dramatic performance, and allowed for those stories to find diverse and interested audiences. For the young men and women involved, authoring occurred at multiple instances and in multiple ways, and through the engagement of multiple cultural artifacts. Traditional scripts about youth, justice, and education were rewritten, not only through the writing of two plays, but also within the various types of authoring that were ongoing, performed, and embodied throughout the Insight Project. In this article, we discuss the various types of authoring that occurred within the theater project and we embed multimedia performance excerpts in order to elucidate six sites of authoring enacted by the participants at critical moments of the process: improvisation; focused storytelling sessions; composing scripts; rehearsals; performances; and talk-backs. (Contains 3 figures and 2 endnotes.)

Through this paper, I consider how we might be aesthetically and relationally accountable in creating research-informed theatre through the conceptual frame of an aesthetic of relationality, and in-depth considerations of the theoretical notions embodiment, imagination and foolishness (as vulnerability-bravery). Through the example of "Cracked: new light on dementia," of which I am the playwright and director, I consider the ways artist-researchers foolishly and imaginatively engage in exploration from the starting point their own bodies, as socially, culturally and historically situated. I additionally extend these considerations towards a vision for how we might engage with persons with dementia beyond the tragic.

In this article, I outline and theorize about a series of three lessons on playwriting I conducted in a secondary English Literature classroom in Singapore using drama improvisation strategies that I name drama-based playwriting, or DBP. I advance the argument that this genre of creative writing is best taught through the medium of drama so as to sensitize students to the demands of the art form that are not normally made apparent through traditional literary analysis. After all, drama has a dual life on the printed page and the theatrical stage.

This article compares and analyses factors that impact when creating a network on both online and live networking platforms, designed as spaces for artistic and critical engagement both within Africa and beyond. As I draw on the African Womens' Playwright Network as my example, I consider how we can acknowledge the materiality of the processes and relationships involved in these kinds of networks, which as Stephansen argues, also involve the making of new publics. In this analysis I particularly reflect on the impact of using Linda Tuhiwai Smith's approach to decolonising indigenous research methodologies when creating a cross-cultural network.

The theatre classroom is necessarily a space in dialogue with myths about the marginalisation of theatre as an art and theatre audiences as a public. It is precisely "because" theatre is a marginalised discipline that curricula should incorporate the processes by which the labour of theatre artists changes value and joins the mainstream; playwrights employed in television offer a relevant study of just that. How do we revise undergraduate curricula in order to substantially address this intermediality in a way that is legible for students? And where do television and theatre meet in existing theatre courses and objectives?

The traditional academic research paper isn't always the best form in which to judge student writing. When students are given a choice in form and genre, their true talents and creativity can be unleashed. Miller offers up classroom examples and ideas on how to let students express their creativity in writing literary papers, research papers, and responses to standardized tests without sacrificing the learning of research techniques, primary source citation, and thinking analytically.

An Indonesian fable is the theme of this three-part lesson for young learners. Students practice with the past-tense verbs used in the fable. By listening, reading and ordering the sentences, and copying a paragraph of the story, students become very familiar with the fable. The lessons finish with homework to write a play based on the fable. Students may select and perform the best play from their group.

The concept of the 'creative' in creative writing has a vexed history. This article explores the myths surrounding creativity and how they have influenced the way teachers have approached playwriting pedagogy. It reports on research into the teaching and learning experiences of students and teachers in secondary schools, focusing on the participants' understanding of creativity and the impact this had on the pedagogical process. The research found that a counterproductive idealist view of creativity persists in classrooms: the teachers and students were operating on a conception of creativity and creative practice that reflected a belief in a mystical and unknowable creative process. This article explores the experiences of creativity through systems theory and argues that this approach can inform teaching and learning for creative processes and products. The article concludes that the teaching and learning practices were unnecessarily tentative and that knowledge of creativity theory would improve the students' development of both playwriting proficiency as well as creativity-relevant skills. It suggests that demystifying the creative process should result in greater student proficiency and improved teaching and learning experiences for teachers and students.

This is an attempt to articulate and explore the relationship between the science of memory and the applied theatre project, "The Not Knowns." The project was a collaboration between theatre practitioners and a psychologist who worked together with a group of young people known, problematically, as the "not knowns" throughout 2014. For applied theatre practitioners, notions of veracity are crucial, if complex, and go far beyond the practice of "giving voice" to marginalised groups and people. Applied Theatre projects which work with participant autobiographies take on the responsibility of articulating the perspective as one of many possible truths, observing conventions which sustain a truth claim, but leaving this open for questioning. In this essay, the project collaborators examine the implications of the notion of memory as adaptable and malleable, as a factor in stasis or change, and as a story that may and must be re-told and re-remembered in an act of self-sustaining performativity.