In Youth We Trust: Youth-led Participation at Galway Community Circus
Whether circus is a casual hobby or a burgeoning passion, when young people take part in Galway Community Circus, their experience is fully theirs. As a youth circus school, GCC keeps our young participants at the front and centre of everything we do.
It’s all a part of Galway Community Circus’ efforts to build a circus that looks like its members. Rather than designing lessons and projects without input from youth participants, GCC strives to be an organisation where every project is something our members want to ‘actively and enthusiastically’ take part in. Wherever possible, youth participants are included in decision-making and given projects and programmes to shape, design and deliver.
One of these projects is GCC’s Scratch Night, a monthly youth-led cabaret-style performance opportunity open to participants ages 14-25. The Scratch Night team manage, curate and organise everything from marketing to production to performance.
Juliette, 19, is a youth leader who has been involved in Scratch Night for five years, since she MC’d the event in her very first month with the circus. Juliette quickly became the regular MC, and her involvement with Scratch Night developed from there. As she puts it, "every single month, my friends and I have the opportunity to create whatever we want.”
And create they do.
“GCC realised they could give us the gift of autonomy so we could develop our skills,” said Juliette. “We do everything ourselves. It’s such an amazing opportunity to have the space to do this.”
Since the onset of Covid-19, the Scratch Night team pivoted to hosting the event online each month, inviting submissions which are then shared in a watch party on Zoom or Facebook. Participants perform, host, curate performances, edit them into a video, and do all the marketing for the online shows. According to Juliette, one unexpected perk of the transition to online has been reaching a wider scope of performers from Galway, around Ireland and even internationally. Though it was a difficult transition, Juliette said she could not be prouder of the end result.
“I can’t think of anywhere else where you would get such free reign from the organisation to truly develop and explore ourselves, and feel the full learning curve from the very start,” she said. As she put it, Juliette has enjoyed the ‘ideal cycle’ in her time with Galway Community Circus since the organisation ‘took her under its wing’. She started with one class a week, then two, then began volunteering in her spare time, and now tutors part-time while continuing to take classes herself. The goal with Scratch Night, Juliette said, is to keep the event as comfortable and approachable as possible so that others can have the same experience as she herself had.
“Circus draws people’s attention to the strengths they already have while still challenging them,” Juliette said. An experience like Juliette’s is a way for young people to build life skills like confidence, self-reliance and perseverance, that will serve them in anything they go on to do.
Another exciting recent development amongst GCC’s youth participants is the appointment of one of our youth circus members and young tutors, Caoimhe, to Caravan International Youth and Social Circus Network’s first Youth Advisory Board. GCC has been working with our international partners to build a youth decision-making structure for this Erasmus+ funded network and is delighted that Caoimhe is now representing Galway and Ireland on Caravan’s Youth Advisory Board together with young people from Lebanon, Palestine, Slovenia, Italy, Finland, Czech Republic, Belgium and the UK.
In addition to Scratch Night and the international Youth Advisory Board, Galway Community Circus appointed our first young person on our Board of Directors last October and is working on re-launching our own Youth Circus Forum which took a break during the Covid-19 pandemic. Later this year, we are embarking on an in-depth consultation with children, young people and their communities on their needs, wishes and ideas for the future of our Circus. This consultation is the starting point towards our new Strategic Plan 2022-2027.
If in ‘the outside world’ of school, work, and day-to-day life, young people don’t always feel like their voices are heard, the circus is somewhere they can participate fully. We encourage all our members to get involved and shape our Circus into a place that they wish it to be.
”The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.” – George Eliot
