Young People Misbehaved

Young People Misbehaved is an ongoing practice-as-research performance project investigating the ways children and young people inherently trouble the adult gaze. These happenings include:

Becoming best friends with a 10 year old;

Asking the two ‘most disruptive’ boys in P7 to fight for the duration of a maths class;

Teenagers dancing in a warehouse at midnight.

Documentation presented as a live triptych. Full thesis available for publishing. Read abstract here:

Performance, risk and young people: How can risk in performance confront the adult spectatorial gaze and challenge our understandings of young people in the world?

I seek to challenge the hypersensitivity and pervasive romantic discourse that inform societal understandings of children and young people as innocent and in constant need of protection. I will explore the paradigms of risk in performance through a triptych of performance experiments, and the potential this has in confronting nostalgic adult presuppositions that warrant the exclusion of young people from full participation in society. In doing so, I will argue that risk is analogous to new possibility, and in this context can trouble the presumed ontological stability of spectating adults - outlining a new social contract for young people in the world.