The Young Actor as Social Agent: Performance, Civic Engagement and Youth Empowerment in Contemporary Nigeria

This article is an examination of the young Nigerian a notions of an actor's role as entertainment and focuses on the actor's responsibility for representing social realities, public concerns, audience engagement, and personal and professional growth. The article considers how young actors have shifted in their practice from traditional theatre to digital performance, comedy and audiovisual media through a qualitative, interpretive and critical literature review and contextual analysis. It discusses the nature of these performance environments and how they enable creative expression, audience engagement, civic communication, and economic opportunities, as well as present young actors with challenges like platform dependence, piracy, lack of infrastructure, and precarious employment and funding. The article presents the conceptual framework of the Young Actor Social Agency Cycle (YASAC) as a way to think through the connections between social observation, creative performance, audience engagement, civic discourse, and expanded agency. It believes that performance, whilst offering potential opportunities for youth participation and empowerment, will only be transformative when accompanied by supportive conditions in education, institutions, economy, and culture. The study concludes by emphasising that understanding the role of the young actors as social agents is a critical aspect of the study for their contribution to the cultural development of Nigeria and the overall possibilities of youth empowerment.