Authoring New Narratives with Youth at the Intersection of the Arts and Justice

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. new social bonds with each other and performed new cultural identities. 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 explore the ways in which, through participation in a theater project and the use of dramatic devices, the young men and women in this project authored themselves. To do so, we conceptualize authoring in several ways. First, we explore the ways in which storytelling allowed participants to perform different characters as they shared narrative accounts throughout the project. Secondly, we look at the ways in which participants took on different roles in the project, both official (e.g., actors, interns) and unofficial (e.g., piano player). And thirdly, we draw on the lens of authoring to look across the various spaces in which and modalities through which meaning was made (Vasudevan, 2006, 2008). For the young men and women who participated in this project, authoring occurred not only during structured activities and interactions, but was also embedded in their involvement in this space. Throughout this article, we will discuss the various types of authoring that occurred within the theater project – e.g., characters that were developed, identities and roles that were assumed, texts that were written, and stories that were performed. In addition, we embed performance excerpts into our article 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.