Eug Taylor

I am developing a Toolkit for Radical Theatre, an evolving collection of methods and experiments exploring how theatre can be made differently, who gets to make it and who it belongs to.

At the heart of my practice is working with young people. Through projects including Common/Wealth’s Take Your Place, I create youth led spaces where young people have genuine creative agency, make decisions and challenge traditional ideas of what theatre should be. I am also working with queer people of colour to uncover and reimagine our histories and futures. I explore histories that have been erased, criminalised, misunderstood or left unrecorded. When our histories are missing, it can be harder to understand how we arrived here and recognise the power within our communities. Through theatre, we are exploring those gaps and using imagination to ask not only where we have come from, but what futures we can create.

Running throughout my practice is the question: who feels that theatre belongs to them? My grassroots work with young people, working class communities, refugees and people seeking sanctuary, queer communities and people of colour is helping me challenge financial, cultural and institutional barriers to theatre. Rather than simply bringing different communities into existing theatre structures, I am exploring how communities can change the structures themselves, shaping the stories, forms, aesthetics and processes of the work.

Eug is passionate, innovative, leading with care & trauma informed practice and is pushing who gets to access arts and culture – and how that can impact our communities and lives. Eug collaborated with Common/Wealth on our immersive, live/ digital performance Demand the Impossible – taking the responsibility of holding the community cast and supporting me to work in them as performers into the whole piece. The community cast was made up of people with direct experience of police injustice. Eug held this with integrity, great care and passion.

Rhiannon White

Common/Wealth

 

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