Mr. Peter Hussey:

I thank the panel for their insights, which were very interesting. This is one sliver of an approach that, in my experience, works in developing resilience. I introduce it to the members because I believe it is timely in light of junior cycle reforms where drama is introduced into the secondary school curriculum and where it is possible it will be introduced in the future at senior cycle. The approach I refer to involves youth theatre, which is very different from speech and drama, musical theatre or stage school. It is a unique type of work, and we are one of many youth theatres in the country that works in this area. We are all under the umbrella of an organisation called Youth Theatre Ireland, which was formally the National Association of Youth Drama, based here in Dublin. It is an amazing organisation that supports youth teachers with training, provides opportunities for young people to become involved and works with people to become facilitators of drama during their period of training with a programme called ArtsTrain.

To take up on what Dr. Bates said, in the past ten years I have found a change in the people who come to our youth theatre. They have moved from being eccentric and outgoing to people who are shy. We are seeing more shy people. A huge number of young people who have anxiety present to us, perhaps by their parents or on the recommendation of their teacher to come to the youth theatre. That profile of person has greatly increased. It is mostly the case with young males but also with females. That peaked my interest, largely because I wondered why somebody would consider that drama would be a place for somebody with anxiety yet, instinctively, I knew the reason. I began research and I am now researching a PhD in Maynooth on examining why that might be the case and whether this art form develops that particular resilience. I have paid a good deal of attention to my work and to the opinions of the young people and the research spoken about. Much of what I will talk about is based on the findings of that research.

The first point I would make is that we are not like school in that groups come together in ensembles and stay together for a long time. Their decision to be part of the ensemble is their own and the length of time as part of the ensemble is however long it lasts. There is no set time on it. Usually, it is between four and five years so there could be a number of these ensembles in a youth theatre at any one time.

It is not like school in that the learning material as to what will happen, and a lot happens, is not set out in advance in the youth theatre over the course of someone's one or two years in it. They do not know what will be involved but they do know will probably be fun and creative in some way. It is not broken into modules in the way it is done in second level, for example, where there might be a module in the Stanislavski method or in physical acting. It is integrated throughout performance, rehearsal and workshop. Strict attendance is not adhered to. There are no registers other than for child protection reasons and nobody is punished or otherwise about attendance. That kind of environment does not exist, nor is there any benign propaganda. By that I mean that nobody will tell the young person that this will be good for them and that they should take part in it. There are no known conclusions. For example, if we start a project we do not know that it will be about how bad drugs are for them, which is benign propaganda. It is true but it is not a conclusion people know before they start the project. They do not know what they will learn or discover as they undertake the project. Instead, there is a kind of pedagogy of surprise, which is based on what I have been looking at and reading about as part of my research. Most people who come in do not know what will happen next month but they know it will be good and that there is an opportunity for the quality and ambition of the work to be good or at a high level. They do not know how they will learn or what they will learn until they discover it themselves. We are providing a space for them to discover this learning about themselves, the world and social systems through the actual process itself. Nothing is set out or flagged in advance.

The young people discover that being flexible is a huge skill so they can take up invitations such as this one to come before the committee at reasonably short notice. To present here, make presentations or do performances in a matter of weeks at various places and so on they must be flexible. They know the learning programme may change radically from one year to another depending on who comes into it or whose needs are being met. Overall, we get a sense that it is about creating adventures. Youth theatre is about creating adventures in learning with young people, and they are very much directors and owners of that. They determine the rate, the pace and the nature of the learning that goes on but primarily they learn unexpectedly; it is learning by surprise. They learn by doing something and reflecting back on it. In that way they realise they did not know that about themselves or that they had no idea how something worked in society until they did the show or went through the process. All of that motivates attendance and generates engagements. Those are the two major aspects that are behind the idea of building resilience.

In recent years, we discovered from my research and also from informal interviews that approximately 75% of our young men and 54% of our young women revealed that they have generalised anxiety disorder. A huge number of them attributed that to events in school. That is not to say that they all see school as a negative place because, as was said correctly earlier, most find a level of enjoyment at school but parts of the school programme trigger the anxiety.

It often has a lot to do with each other in terms of bullying for example. That is well known and well researched at this stage.

What school does not offer, however, and what this pedagogy of surprise seems to offer is what we call "an aesthetic engagement". That is completely missing from their lives. An aesthetic engagement is, in a way, a counteractive to everything else that is going on. It is basically the opposite of an anaesthetic engagement where they are anaesthetised in every other part of their lives. Aesthetic engagement involves four things; emotion, intellect, body and imagination working at exactly the same time. It is very hard working. One does not put oneself through that every part of one's day because it exhausts one. In the research, people are saying to me, in particular young men, that when they come into the theatre programme, they forget about the stress for a brief period or about the anxiety. They are so in the moment that it is sort of an act of mindfulness. In the moment, they are making work that involves all those four things and does not focus on just one, which school does at certain times. They leave the space refreshed. It is a sort of oasis for them to escape what is going on. The anxiety comes back when they go down the stairs or go out into the street and it comes back later on.

However, three of four people said interesting things to me. They said they were so attracted to this that they started to look for other opportunities and began to take part more and more in the youth theatre. Over a period of time, they began to experience different types of mental process. My research and cognitive neuroscience, in particular, look at what happens to the brain of an actor and a young person when we do collaborative theatre and shows that all of these hormones and drugs cascade through the system when one is involved in an aesthetic engagement. Cortisone is usually there when one is not but just has anxiety and stress. That damages the brain in the long term. Adrenalin is there as is serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin, which is really significant because it encourages them to feel that people want to love them. After a performance, there is a huge coming down because one is really recovering from the dose one has just got of everything I mentioned. Eventually, young people find that their neural pathways are repatterned. They lay down new connectors and habits of being which is one thing that happens without them ever thinking about mental health. It is just from engaging in this kind of collaborative creative activity.

Performances are about a range of issues. They are not flagged in the sense of saying we are now going to make a performance about mental health or well-being. It is an open place where their issues are developed and performances come out of them, such as this one, which was about school and the issues they felt about it. That is why I agreed with Dr. Bates when he said this was when they were expressing their fear, held it and made something out of it. That was one a few years ago. Other ones are about how they respond to themselves as performance images. That is, when they are performing, the different facets they play using dialogue and scripts to make small talk. The act of being in a theatre itself helps them to understand the different roles they play, including backstage or using costumes and so on. Crucially, they have to understand how to be looked at as everybody in this room needs at some point to understand that one is looked at as a public figure making public speeches. I am sure nobody teaches the members that they have to feel how it is when people are staring at them quietly, assessing them as they speak. That is a huge thing for teachers but also for performers. It is the main part of the training we are giving them. It is about what goes on in one's body when that happens.

Other work looks at how one can use the stress one feels to create excitement about one's performance or an opportunity coming towards one. Using stress rather than misusing it is a key attribute. They also look at relationships and the society around them. Some theatre is made on their issues so "Indigo" was made before the marriage equality referendum two years ago as a piece to explore their reaction to it. Even though none of them were old enough to vote, they wanted people hear what they had to say. They explore concepts of gender and beauty which are also themes that come from them around how society makes young men and women. This was reflected in a production called "Flawless" which we brought to France. Other people work with us to do research, including Sarah Meaney who is currently making a PhD on how some schools ease out those who do not belong. She says that, in a sense, no one is expelled anymore. They are neglected or pushed to the side. Her thesis is "Dropped Out or Kicked Out?" and she uses our actors and their experience in schools to dramatise the stories of those who have had this experience. Our young people understand what the process is about by doing that.

Our most recent piece is "Venetians" which was two weeks ago and in which we looked at migration. They are really affected by the issues around migration and want to explore that. In so doing, they are not just looking at the stories of people from Libya or our new communities who are in the youth theatre, but looking also at those who have left Ireland and who are older members of they youth theatre. Some send back monologues saying what it is like in Australia and why they will not come back. Some who have come back have said why they were going to. They are also looking at the theory of migration and this idea of a desire for a better place, to live elsewhere and for a better state of being. They look at aspects like personal relationships and how our relationships are about power. They consider how teacher-student relationships are about power and how space around them, like this space, works in terms of status and power. That will not have escaped them, in a sense. Neither will the school place where they are learning. They find themselves quite passive in that environment where the teachers are the active ones doing all the doing while they do all the receiving. That comes out in their exploration of power based on personal relationships. As such, the collaboration they do is risky because mostly today education is driving us further and further towards an individual engagement with material and an individual reflection on it rather than towards working in a team or group where one has to take risks. I think this is one of the big aspects of school and I hear my colleagues say the same thing. One just does not know what the outcome will be when one is working with other people. One does not know how it is going to end. One has to take risks about making decisions about he outcome.

They understand how to use failure. All theatre is about failure. We could not possibly rehearse if we knew it was going to be perfect. Nobody is going to get a script and say "Learn the lines and we will do this show on Sunday". One has to rehearse in order to see what can go wrong and use that as the basis for one's work. Theatre helps them defer gratification and this is one of those skills that build up resilience. It is about working and planning today to have a major reward after one has put in a great deal of work. Another notion being discussed is the idea of progression. Many people with anxiety and depression feel stuck but when they compare what they are doing in theatre and how they are learning, they can see the progression they are taking. This is not a thing that holds them back. Rather, it means they can apply it to their lives. Using information is a big one. I believe that in school they are mostly encouraged to ask for permission to do things rather than to use information. It is not only in school but outside. They need permission to speak or to be somebody. That concept of having to ask for permission before one can act is alien to theatre and would not produce any kind of theatre if it were implemented. Instead, one has to use all the information around one. One must read groups or individuals and their intentions. One must read other actors, see where power is happening and what is likely to happen and act on that. One commits to action based on one's use of information. It is a massive change in their way of thinking and it is the key for our young people in developing resilience rather than passively being overwhelmed by information, stuck or internalising it or not having the agency to deal with it.

Finally, managing impulses is another major one for collaborative drama.

One must channel those impulses into something creative, rather than turning them inwards and repressing one's desire to speak. One must also control over-reactions to things or people will say that one is over-acting and that the performance is bad. One learns to manage how one deals with situations of crisis. Finally, managing impulses is not just about calming people down. It is also about encouraging them to speak up. If one has an impulse that something is wrong and one wants to sedate it, one can do that in the drama process. Otherwise, it is very flat and boring.

Love, family and belonging are the traditional values that people associate with a youth theatre which is an intensely creative and collaborative experience. Belonging to a group is very important. One young person spoke about being secretly suicidal and planning his suicide until his first show, when he got a round of applause. He did not think anything of it until he got that round of applause. He felt that if the audience, who did not know him, applauded what he was doing then it was a short enough step for him to appreciate the person doing it, namely, himself. That changed his life.

In terms of recommendations, first we must continue to support youth theatre provision in this country through Youth Theatre Ireland. Ours is one of the few youth theatres that is funded regularly by our local authority, which is marvellous. That shows a huge understanding of and investment in youth theatre. We also need to look at the CAO system rather than schools themselves because a lot of stress on young people comes from the expectations around points. We must examine the requirements for entry to university and consider the inclusion of things like involvement in youth theatre. A controlled, monitored and possibly assessed involvement in a youth theatre programme run by Youth Theatre Ireland for a year, for example, could yield a certain number of points for young people. That could be implemented fairly easily and would encourage participation by young people.

In terms of the provision of drama at second level, there is a notion that drama can be taught by anyone but we would never accept that concept in terms of music or art, for example. We would not accept that a physical education teacher could teach music or that a maths teacher could teach art. Drama is a discipline that requires an enormous amount of practice, skill and training. To do it right, to bring about all of the outcomes about which I spoke, requires trained pedagogues. To do it wrong creates exactly the opposite outcome. It furthers the stress and increases the torture that young people feel, if they are in the wrong environment and made to perform without any preparation. We all have memories, from a very young age, of having to stand up and sing something when we were not ready.