Teenagers: Who’d have them? Who’d work with them? Dorothy Max Prior says yes to both…
“Our youth love luxury. They have bad manners and despise authority. They show disrespect for their elders and love to chatter instead of exercise… They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up food and terrorise their teachers.”
Oh, those terrible Millennials. Or is it Gen Z? Or Generation Alpha, I believe we’re up to now. But no, this was written by Socrates, around 400BC.
The quote features in La Mecànica’s A Teen Odyssey – a fabulous, physical, immersive, and interactive theatre show, aimed at young people aged 12 and above, as well as adults (who, of course, were once adolescents!). When I say ‘features’ it is not spoken by an actor on a stage. It flashes up on our phones as one of numerous quiz questions we experience… But I am ahead of myself. Let’s step back.
I am in Great Yarmouth, here for the Out There Festival. I am wearing many different hats: reporting on the Festival for Total Theatre Magazine; doing webradio broadcasts for Circostrada’s FRESH Streets conference; and working for Out There Arts’ Creative People and Places (CPP) collaboration with Freshly Greated, a Yarmouth-based organisation that provides opportunities for young people to participate in arts activities.
In that last capacity, I had, a few weeks previously, visited a community centre where an Our Space session is held weekly, a kind of contemporary youth club, to see if I could persuade people to join a scheme for budding young reporters, to be mentored during the Out There Festival. It went well, with 16 people signing up. Out There’s communications manager Marcin Rodwell joined me in offering workshops over the following weeks leading up to the Festival. There’s sessions on writing about performance in general and outdoor arts in particular, reviewing skills, PR and marketing know-how, and looking at broader issues of festival programming choices.
So far so good. Worryingly, though, when it came to the busy Friday and Saturday of the Festival – and actually going to see the shows we’d picked for the group – the turn-out was disappointingly rather low. But there were good reasons, as I discovered later…
A Teen Odyssey was on our Saturday afternoon list. We were sure there would be a good turn out for this one! I’m here at the venue, but where are my young people? Ah, there’s some of them! But rather than accompanying me as audience, it would seem that they are one step ahead and have volunteered to take part in the show, in which the core team of professional performers is joined by a number of volunteer performers-cum-ushers.
So, more about A Teen Odyssey…
The show requires your phone to run an app (designed by La Fura dels Baus’ Èpica Foundation) called Kalliopé 2. And of course my tired old Samsung phone tells me it doesn’t have enough space to download the app. Flustered, I try to delete apps I don’t need. Still no good. Damn shows that use new technology, I mutter under my breath. Grrrr. One of the teens comes over to help, and after a few minutes – in which my phone crashes twice – kindly sorts me out a far more up-to-date device, which comes pre-loaded with Kalliopé 2, for me to borrow. Hurrah! He shows me how to sign in with my birth year, which becomes relevant during the show, taking me to a series of questions, some of the pub quiz type and some personal.
Well , maybe it’ll be OK. But I’m still wary. Other than Janet Cardiff’s brilliant Edinburgh Walk, I really can’t remember taking part in a theatre show that uses phones well.
Luckily my fears are unfounded. The phones become part of the scenography: moving round the dark indoor space, we are invited to turn our phone outwards or upwards, so that the space becomes illuminated by many little coloured rectangles. We then realise that the colours we are showing are determined by those quiz questions answered earlier, and we flock and de-flock in the space, fitting inside squares or triangles outlined in neon tape as instructed by our answers. Sometimes we find ourselves with people our own age – being aged 70, I’m what in Britain is called a Baby Boomer, but I learn that in Spain there is a Silent Generation of people who grew up in the shadow of the Spanish Civil War, under the terrors of Franco,who choose not to talk about it. In other groupings around the room, there are all the usual alphabetical designations of X, Y and Z plus aforementioned Millennials and Alphas. On the pre-recorded soundtrack, we hear litanies of the usual complaints about teens – the lack of concentration, the unkempt rooms, the awful choices in clothes and music, the answering back… But it is all nothing new, as the Socrates quote reminds us.
Then, we find ourselves regrouped in a way that ignores age, depending on whether, say, our affinity is to guitars or drums (I’m drums, of course); or whether we are a snuggle with a lover by the open fire sort of person versus romantic walk on the beach (beach, naturally). We are thus noting that there are things that draw us to and align us with people outside of our age group – fellow humans with whom we have a non-age-based connection.
Whilst we – the ‘spectactors’ as Augusto Boal would have it – are moving in and out of various configurations, weaving amongst and through us are two company members. The young woman performer, Sienna Vila, has a beautiful, fluid physical performance style; and the older man, Joan Maria Pascual, is an equally solid presence in the space. Their duets are poignant demonstrations of the push and pull between the generations; the drive for independence versus the desire for safety. There is also a DJ mixing live, keeping the energy in the room moving along. The piece is directed by Pau Bachero, with Sienna’s mother Jenny Vila (the company’s co-founder) as lighting designer and creative producer. The company used a process of dramaturgical consultation with young people in the creation of the show, with local volunteers joining them in each place they play in.
By the end, I’m totally won over – such beautiful performances, such clever dramaturgy, such a wonderful design. A grand success. And the integration of the local community members is wonderful – there’s not a dry eye in the house as we hear one of the actors, with their arm round them, tell us that ‘Sonia’ never studied the art course that she wanted to, as she was told she’d never earn a living that way; or that ‘Paul’ used to cry alone in bed after his mother died, because he was told that boys don’t cry.
La Mecànica’s A Teen Odyssey is heading off to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025, playing at Summerhall venue all through August. Which reminds me to mention that I’ve seen some of the best ever shows made in collaboration with teens at the Edinburgh Fringe. I’m talking about Ontroerend Goed’s teen trilogy of Once and For All We’re Going to Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen; Teen Riot; and All That Is Wrong. As I wrote for Total Theatre many years back: ‘It is a powerful body of work, capturing the changes through the teenage years with extraordinary precision and insight – from the just-on-the-brink kids caught between childhood toys and adult pleasures that we meet in the first show, through the “I want to be understood but not by YOU” boxed-in horrors of the mid-teen years, to finally the dawn of young adulthood with a new mantra – no longer “you don’t understand” but now “I want to understand.”’ The star of the third show was 18-year-old writer and actor Koba Ryckewaert, who had appeared in both of the previous shows in the trilogy; the youngest in the group.
I remember that I saw this trilogy of shows over a number of years, from around 2006 onwards, as my own sons moved through the teenage years. And indeed, I saw Once and For All We’re Going to Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen – with its celebratory and riotous on-stage skateboarding, popping of streamers, and burning of Barbie dolls – on the day I arrived back in Edinburgh exhausted after hosting a party for 14-year-olds. ‘That’s my life, right there,’ I whispered to my companion Pippa Bailey as we surveyed the complete chaos exploding on stage at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre.
But back to 2025 – and the Out There Festival in Yarmouth. It also turns out that some of the other shows in this year’s Out There Festival featured engagement from some of our errant young people from the CPP group – too busy doing it to report on it, it would seem! Some of them are involved in the bamboo fest at the Beach of Dreams: helping out on Bamboology’s Bamboo Playground and Compagnie Moso’s Morphosis, which involves the creation of a climbing ‘archi-structure’ made of bamboo, using hundreds of selected bamboo canes cut and prepared for maximum resistance.
There is also the Young Out There (YOT) strand, in which young musicians and circus artists take to the Festival’s stages. They can be found on the seafront, at the Beach of Dreams stage – but there are also YOT takeovers on stages elsewhere. I catch some of them in St George’s Park, where they have taken over Mr Alexander’s Travelling Show – a colourful vintage theatre stage – for a mid-afternoon slot. There’s a juggler specialising in diabolo, an energetic acrobatic dance, and a psych-folk singer playing a shruti box. At other points in the day, on various stages, audiences were treated to pop, rock and folk bands; poets and dance troupes; and plenty of circus – hula hooping, aerial silks, juggling and more. Which might be the right moment to mention that many of these young people have trained with Out There Arts very own youth circus school and troupe, Drillaz Circus School, who presented their own cabaret show in St George’s Park.
So there is ample evidence of youth engagement with the arts in Great Yarmouth – much down to the initiatives taken by Out There Arts and their partners, including Freshly Greated – with plenty more planned over the coming year, leading up to Out There Festival 2026 and beyond.
All things considered, the kids are alright.
Featured image (top): La Mecànica: A Teen Odyssey. Photo Luca Rocchi
Dorothy Max Prior saw La Mecànica: A Teen Odyssey at St George’s Theatre in Great Yarmouth on Saturday 31 May 2025, as part of Out There Festival www.outtherearts.org.uk
La Mecànica is a female-led international performing arts producing company based in Mallorca, committed to creating and supporting the highest quality work for the greatest community impact. See https://www.lamecanica.org/en
La Mecànica: A Teen Odyssey plays at Summerhall from 31 July 31st to 25 August, (except the 11th and the 18th) as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025. There are two shows daily, at 12noon and 1.30pm. See https://festival.summerhallarts.co.uk/events/a-teen-odyssey/
Young Out There is a youth-led creative programme bringing together inspirational experiences and creative activity produced for, with and by local young people from schools, colleges and other youth groups from the Borough of Great Yarmouth. Devised by the Young Out There Collective, the programme fosters collaboration with creative professionals, including local, national and international artists, and provides a platform for young talent express their creativity as part of The Out There International Festival of Outdoor Arts and Circus. https://outtherearts.org.uk/young-out-there/
Freshly Greated is a community-led Arts Council funded project as part of the national flagship Creative People and Places programme with confirmed funding to end of March 2025. FG works closely in and with people living in neighbourhoods in the most socio-economically deprived areas of Great Yarmouth and Gorleston. https://www.freshlygreated.org.uk/
