Youth agency and place-making in post-crisis applied site-specific theatre: Insights from the Regrowth project

This article examines how applied site-specific theatre can support young people in a post-crisis context through a qualitative study of the Regrowth project on the South Coast of New South Wales. The analysis is organized around three themes, ‘Agency’, ‘Sensemaking’ and ‘Connection’, which together describe how meaningful authorship, story in place and ensemble relations were enacted and made publicly legible through performance. Agency describes how participants exercised meaningful decision-making power from first ideas to final staging, enabled by non-hierarchical routines that distributed leadership and made authorship visible. ‘Sensemaking’ captures how story in place connected personal experience to public concern, with the speculative frame refracting local anxieties about the environment into communicable theatrical images and actions. ‘Connection’ refers to the ensemble relations that fostered trust within the group and ties with families, educators and local services through the public event. Read together, these themes operate as an ecology of practice in which decision-making produces commitment and clarity, story in place turns that clarity into shared knowledge, and ensemble relations sustain and extend the work to community. The study clarifies the under-theorized convergence of applied and site-specific practices and offers learnings for design and policy in youth arts, education and community recovery programmes.