The drama workshop: Collective discernment and artistic practice as relational pedagogies for an epoch of intersecting ecological, social, and economic crises (2025-2030)
How does the drama workshop equip young people for both the world we have and the better world-to-be-imagined?
Background
The Drama Workshop is a global research project that brings young people and artist-teachers together in Canada, Greece, Nigeria, India, and Ireland. Through theatre practices—such as solo performance, devised theatre, site-specific work, and ensemble building—the project explores how workshops can become spaces of cooperation, imagination, and civic engagement. At a moment of global polarization, the project positions the drama workshop as both a creative practice and a civic model for imagining more cooperative and life-sustaining futures.
Research Objectives
To bring young people together in drama workshops that spark cooperation, creativity, and shared problem-solving skills they carry into classrooms, communities, and everyday life.
To connect theatre with civic life by linking artistic expression to schools, public forums, and community spaces, showing how drama can fuel participation and responsibility.
To face today’s crises through art using theatre to confront ecological, social, and economic challenges, turning complexity into conversation, imagination, and collective action.
To build global connections among youth and artist-teachers in Canada, Greece, Nigeria, India, and Ireland, creating collaborations that cross cultures, borders, and generations.
To share performances and resources that spread drama practices to wider publics, inspiring educators, communities, and policymakers to imagine and work toward more just and sustainable futures.
Our Global Collaborators
Dr. Erika Piazzoli: Balbriggan, Ireland
Dr. Piazzoli is a researcher, practitioner, and lecturer in arts education at Trinity College, Dublin and coordinates the Master’s in Education (M.Ed.) postgraduate programme. Dr. Piazzoli will provide insight into how the overlapping economic, environmental, and social challenges of this current time are affecting the lives of migrant youth in a coastal town north of Dublin. Her own research considers the role of arts-based learning and artistic practice-as-research in embodiment and language learning for this community of young people.
Dr. Myrto Pigkou-Repousi: Thessaloniki, Greece
Dr. Pigkou-Repousi, who has worked with us for ten years, will help us explore and understand how environmental, economic, and social conditions coalesce in Greece, particularly at the intersections of Greece’s neoliberal government, privatization, mass tourism, and wildfires. Dr. Pigkou-Repousi is an Assistant Professor of Theatre in Education at the School of Drama, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her research focuses on citizenship education in disadvantaged schools in Greece using the model of ensemble theatre.
Dr. Izuu Nwankwo: Ibadan, Nigeria
Dr. Nwankwo is a theatre scholar, teacher, and playwright whose research interests revolve around African and African diaspora theatre, performance, and popular culture. He is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Toronto (UofT). Dr. Nwankwo will work with us to explore how performance forms in Nigeria are put to work to foster agency for young people in a context where food insecurity, climate change, and rapid globalization have affected the livelihoods of many in urban and rural areas.
Munia Debleena Tripathi: Kolkata, India
Our new collaborator from India, who is a former PhD supervisee of the PI, will work with the team to examine the intersection between climate change, nationalist politics, and economic circumstance within the context of Kolkata, which, in 2024, experienced its hottest April on record (Banerjee, 2024). She researches contemporary Bangla theatre, applied theatre, and spectatorship. She works as a playwright, theatre director, trainer and workshop-facilitator.
Our Artist Collaborators
Andrew Kushnir
Kushnir is a Toronto-based director, actor, playwright, artistic director of the socially- engaged theatre company Project: Humanity, a sessional lecturer at the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies (UofT), and long-time collaborator. His plays include: Towards Youth: A Play on Radical Hope, which drew entirely from research data from my previous SSHRC project and is published in my book, Hope in a Collapsing World: Youth, Theatre and Listening as a Political Alternative, the monograph of that project. He will work with the Toronto team in developing and implementing the devising and ensemble-building pedagogy of the project in Years 1 and 2.
Zorana Sadiq:
Sadiq is an award-winning Toronto-based actor, playwright, and classical musician with a distinct solo-performance repertoire that has included the plays MixTape (Crow’s Theatre-Dora Mavor Moore Nomination for 2022) and the forthcoming Comfort Food (Crow’s Theatre). She will lead the design and implementation of the solo performance and ensemble pedagogy in Years 1 and 2.
Liisa Repo-Martell
Bio Coming Soon
Amaka Umeh
Bio Coming Soon
Alan Dilworth
Bio Coming Soon
Our Teacher Collaborators
Baņuta Rubess
Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Toronto
Rubess is a part-time appointed faculty member at the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies (UofT). She teaches the Foundations Acting course for second-year students. She is also a multidisciplinary theatre artist who will lead the ensemble-building pedagogy in Year 2 at the Toronto university research site, with the students in her Foundations Acting course.
Gabrielle Kemeny
University of Toronto Schools
Bio Coming Soon
Dr. Samuel Chukwu-Okoronkwo
Department of Theatre Arts, Gregory University Uturu, Abia State, Nigeria
Bio Coming Soon