Lewisham Youth Theatre (LYT) nurtures and inspires young people’s voices through free participatory theatre activities, helping them to develop enduring and transferable skills that lead to increased life chances and long term well-being. We bring young people together from across the Lewisham community to create outstanding theatre in an environment of high expectations and collaboration. We work from the core belief that artistic excellence is key to expanding young people’s horizons and creating lasting transformation.
We work with young people age 3-24 who live or learn in Lewisham. We provide a universal service, but target recruitment at young people in need across a range of disadvantages. Over 70% of participants face disadvantage across a range of needs, including poverty, mental health needs, learning difficulties, family disruption (looked after children, young carers, bereaved young people and those known to social services) and other marginalisation.
Since 1987, LYT has provided free drama, performance and technical theatre programmes for young people aged 8-24. All programmes are free to young people. Participation is based on commitment rather than creative ability, and participants must not currently take part in other out of school drama activity. Each year, LYT works with 200+ young people in sustained projects and reaches another 400+ through one-off outreach sessions.
LYT provides a mixture of performance-based projects (where participants work towards a public performance), ‘workshop groups’ (drama and social skill-based sessions) and technical theatre training. Projects are separated into age groups for 8-12s, 12-14s, 14-19s and 16-24s. Performance projects usually run for 3-5 months culminating in an intensive full week leading to performance; Workshop projects usually run weekly for 5-6 weeks. Often, participants progress to projects requiring increased commitment both within and between programme years.
Around these projects, LYT delivers a series of wrap-around activities that supports the engagement and learning of participants.
LYT offers participants opportunities to take part in:
