The objectives of the project were to support young people's cultural citizenship, to innovate in terms of opening up and appropriating theatres, and to develop cooperation between groups of young people and professionals from these cultural institutions. In implementing Open Houses, we wanted to design hybrid and innovative responses through international encounters. European cooperation allowed us to discover other ways of doing things and to open up to other approaches. We wanted to give young people the possibility of questioning their links to the cultural institution, of (re)discovering it, of questioning how it works and of making a place for themselves through a collective experience understood as an apprenticeship, a commitment or a stage in their professionalization. Conversely, we wanted to accompany theatre professionals who are interested in the practices, desires and knowledge of young people to contribute to the development of their cultural offer. We wanted to lead a collective process of transformation, to constitute a space of transnational cooperation involving all the stakeholders and thus to innovate in the field of cultural action and support for the power to act.
We applied for this project after identifying issues shared by the partners. On the one hand, the theatres expressed the need to improve their offers and actions aimed at young adults, especially from working class backgrounds, as they are under-represented in the audiences of the theatres in the project. Yet these cultural institutions want to involve the whole local population and reach out to their entire territory. On the other hand, the young people showed a desire for cultural engagement but lacked the opportunities and means necessary to appropriate the means of creation, production, dissemination and cultural consumption. In other words, their access to their cultural citizenship. Moreover, the need for young people has increased in the context of the Covid 19 pandemic. Being closed, places of culture have become inaccessible, directly impacting on the cultural citizenship of people, especially young people in the process of building their identity. Faced with these challenges, the opportunity of this European project was to offer spaces, time and resources to theatre professionals and young people to build a common experience of cooperation based on 3 local experiments.