Sites of possibility: applied theatre and digital storytelling with youth

As a process for engaging marginalised voices in the social/cultural economy of the media, digital storytelling has garnered much attention from media artists, community organisers and scholars since the early 1990s. The practice of digital storytelling, or the making and sharing of personal narratives through recorded voice-overs, digital photography and video, music and/or digitally composed multi-media collages, parallels many aspects of applied drama/theatre; and yet, little scholarship exists around how digital storytelling can and does function as an intentionally facilitated, critical performance practice with young people. This article argues that digital storytelling as an applied theatre praxis can revision the ways we represent and engage young people in society. The author draws on practical examples from an applied theatre project to examine how digital storytelling, as both a creative process and a performance product, functions as a political act of cultural production. She demonstrates how, together, live and mediated performance practices offer young people an opportunity to reflect and archive – (re)vision and (re)construct – complex notions of identity, culture and community.